In this paper, we look for evidence of economies or diseconomies of scale in the empirical project metrics reported in the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) repository, and compare our results with those predicted by COCOMO II and the Putnam Model. We construct an economic framework upon the derived model, showing how an understanding of the scale economies of software engineering can be useful to the software development manager seeking to optimize release size and development team size. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract Agile methods emerge as an alternative to improve quality and performance in software development processes. However, as agile methods are essentially focused on human aspects, their application in companies depends mostly on their adequacy to the current organizational culture. This study explores the view of the organizational culture in three levels as a theoretical framework to allow early detection of problems, which could jeopardize the adoption of agile methods by a company. This article points out that many facilitators or obstacles to the adoption of an agile method can be hidden in the lower levels of the organizational culture. Additionally, the article shows that a superficial analysis of those issues can lead to a miscomprehension about the possibility of applying an agile method in a software company. This article also evidences that the interpretation of the levels of organizational culture improves the understanding of how an agile culture should be established. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract With the drastic development of semantic‐driven applications, assessing the quality of ontologies has received more attention. Measuring and assessing the quality of ontologies can help ontology engineers to control project management and reduce the risk of project failures. However, most of the existing ontology metrics for measuring and assessing the quality of ontologies are defined based on ontology structure, and neglect the stability of ontology measurement. In this paper, we concentrate on stable ontology measurement by using semantically derived ontology metrics. We propose four ontology cohesion metrics, which fully consider the implicitly expressed semantic information and are defined based on ontological semantics rather than ontology structure. Before measuring and assessing an ontology, we materialize a pre‐processing for stable ontology measurement by treating the ontology. The proposed ontology cohesion metrics are theoretically validated by the validation criteria of object‐oriented software. The experimental results show that we can successfully collect more semantic knowledge from the testing ontologies for stable ontology measurement by using the proposed ontology cohesion metrics. The ontology cohesion metrics proposed in this paper can be reasonably used as a cogent complementarity of existing ontology metrics. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Abstract With the enhancement of hardware and software engineering, the effectiveness and correctness of software is less and less doubted and customers are more aware about whether software services are available or not when needed. Software maintenance is one of the main reasons that make software unavailable and it is often very expensive to perform maintenance tasks. Common approaches of studying software maintenance are to consider it as a static by‐product of software operation and only the maintenance cost is covered. In this paper, software maintenance policies are studied with the consideration of unavailable service time. A non‐homogeneous continuous Markov chain is adopted for modeling the software operation and maintenance process, and the cost of software unavailability that is brought in by software maintenance is investigated and analyzed for searching the optimal maintenance policy, which aims at minimizing the average maintenance time cost. The optimality of our proposed policy is shown and checked by numerical examples with discussions of its possible application perspectives. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract This paper presents our experiences in building a UML‐based approach for maintaining software products of a large‐scale industrial product family. It enables software architects to define rules and constraints for a product family architecture to be enforced on individual product architectures. The target system of our study was the Nokia ISA platform for a mobile phone product family, a complex software system comprising thousands of components and several million lines of code. We outline our approach and the accompanying tools, and report our experiences and lessons learned in assessing the architectural integrity of 10 ISA platform releases and the associated products. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract Fowler et al. identified 22 Code Bad Smells to direct the effective refactoring of code. These are increasingly being taken up by software engineers. However, the empirical basis of using Code Bad Smells to direct refactoring and to address ‘trouble’ in code is not clear, i.e., we do not know whether using Code Bad Smells to target code improvement is effective. This paper aims to identify what is currently known about Code Bad Smells. We have performed a systematic literature review of 319 papers published since Fowler et al. identified Code Bad Smells (2000 to June 2009). We analysed in detail 39 of the most relevant papers. Our findings indicate that Duplicated Code receives most research attention, whereas some Code Bad Smells, e.g., Message Chains, receive little. This suggests that our knowledge of some Code Bad Smells remains insufficient. Our findings also show that very few studies report on the impact of using Code Bad Smells, with most studies instead focused on developing tools and methods to automatically detect Code Bad Smells. This indicates an important gap in the current knowledge of Code Bad Smells. Overall this review suggests that there is little evidence currently available to justify using Code Bad Smells. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract The increasing demand for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions as well as the high rates of troubled ERP implementations and outright cancellations calls for developing effort estimation practices to systematically deal with uncertainties in ERP projects. This paper describes an approach—and a case study—to balancing uncertainties of context in the very early project stages, when an ERP adopter initiates a request‐for‐proposal process and when alternative bids are to be compared for the purpose of choosing an implementation partner. The proposed empirical approach leverages the complementary application of three techniques, an algorithmic estimation model, Monte Carlo simulation, and portfolio management. Our case study findings show how the ability of our approach to model uncertainty allows practitioners to address the challenging question of how to adjust project context factors so that chances of project success are increased. We also include a discussion on the implications of our approach for practice as well as on the possible validity threats and what the practitioner could do to counterpart them. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract Business processes are a core concept of modern enterprise organization. Mainly, they describe the way a company is working internally and how the added value is generated. But as today's businesses are increasingly working in new forms, such as collaborations, cooperations, alliances etc., the single‐enterprise‐focused business process concept is hardly suitable. In this paper, we focus on collaborative scenarios where fully independent enterprises co‐work in order to generate a common added value. For this application environment, we conceive the concept of peer‐to‐peer (P2P) business processes. We show that this concept requires new ways of model generation, because a traditional modeling by a group of human modellers is hard to realize in such a business environment. This new modeling approach is a module‐based, industrial‐kind business process construction. In order to investigate the feasibility of the construction method, we developed a software prototype that can perform an automated construction of P2P business processes. We close this paper with technical insights in this prototype to describe how it is working. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.