arXiv subjects

Jürgen Münch

Publications and source records attributed to Jürgen Münch.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

GQM+Strategies: A Comprehensive Methodology for Aligning Business Strategies with Software Measurement

In software-intensive organizations, an organizational management system will not guarantee organizational success unless the business strategy can be translated into a set of operational software goals. The Goal Question Metric (GQM) approach has proven itself useful in a variety of industrial settings to support quantitative software project management. However, it does not address linking software measurement goals to higher-level goals of the organization in which the software is being developed. This linkage is important, as it helps to justify software measurement efforts and allows measurement data to contribute to higher-level decisions. In this paper, we propose a GQM+Strategies(R) measurement approach that builds on the GQM approach to plan and implement software measurement. GQM+Strategies(R) provides mechanisms for explicitly linking software measurement goals to higher-level goals for the software organization, and further to goals and strategies at the level of the entire business. The proposed method is illustrated in the context of an example application of the method.

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arXiv2014

Systematic Task Allocation Evaluation in Distributed Software Development

Systematic task allocation to different development sites in global software de- velopment projects can open business and engineering perspectives and help to reduce risks and problems inherent in distributed development. Relying only on a single evaluation criterion such as development cost when distributing tasks to development sites has shown to be very risky and often does not lead to successful solutions in the long run. Task allocation in global software projects is challenging due to a multitude of impact factors and constraints. Systematic allocation decisions require the ability to evaluate and compare task allocation alternatives and to effectively establish customized task allocation practices in an organization. In this article, we present a customizable process for task allocation evaluation that is based on results from a systematic interview study with practitioners. In this process, the relevant criteria for evaluating task allocation alternatives are derived by applying principles from goal-oriented measurement. In addition, the customization of the process is demonstrated, related work and limitations are sketched, and an outlook on future work is given.

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arXiv2014

Scoping Software Process Models - Initial Concepts and Experience from Defining Space Standards

Defining process standards by integrating, harmonizing, and standardizing heterogeneous and often implicit processes is an important task, especially for large development organizations. However, many challenges exist, such as limiting the scope of process standards, coping with different levels of process model abstraction, and identifying relevant process variabilities to be included in the standard. On the one hand, eliminating process variability by building more abstract models with higher degrees of interpretation has many disadvantages, such as less control over the process. Integrating all kinds of variability, on the other hand, leads to high process deployment costs. This article describes requirements and concepts for determining the scope of process standards based on a characterization of the potential products to be produced in the future, the projects expected for the future, and the respective process capabilities needed. In addition, the article sketches experience from determining the scope of space process standards for satellite software development. Finally, related work with respect to process model scoping, conclusions, and an outlook on future work are presented.

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arXiv2014

Acquisition of a Project-Specific Process

Currently, proposed development processes are often considered too generic for operational use. This often leads to a misunderstanding of the project-specific processes and its refuse. One reason for non-appropriate project-specific processes is insufficient support for the tailoring of generic processes to project characteristics and context constraints. To tackle this problem, we propose a method for the acquisition of a project-specific process. This method uses a domain-specific process line for top-down process tailoring and supports bottom-up refinement of the defined generic process based on tracking process activities. The expected advantage of the method is tailoring efficiency gained by usage of a process line and higher process adherence gained by bottom-up adaptation of the process. The work described was conducted in the automotive domain. This article presents an overview of the so-called Emergent Process Acquisition method (EPAc) and sketches an initial validation study.

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arXiv2014

State of the Practice in Software Effort Estimation: A Survey and Literature Review

Effort estimation is a key factor for software project success, defined as delivering software of agreed quality and functionality within schedule and budget. Traditionally, effort estimation has been used for planning and tracking project resources. Effort estimation methods founded on those goals typically focus on providing exact estimates and usually do not support objectives that have recently become important within the software industry, such as systematic and reliable analysis of causal effort dependencies. This article presents the results of a study of software effort estimation from an industrial perspective. The study surveys industrial objectives, the abilities of software organizations to apply certain estimation methods, and actually applied practices of software effort estimation. Finally, requirements for effort estimation methods identified in the survey are compared against existing estimation methods.

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arXiv2014

Goal-Oriented Setup and Usage of Custom-Tailored Software Cockpits

Software Cockpits, also known as Software Project Control Centers, support the management and controlling of software and system development projects and provide means for quantitative measurement-based project control. Currently, many companies are developing simple control dashboards that are mainly based on Spreadsheet applications. Alternatively, they use solutions providing a fixed set of project control functionality that cannot be sufficiently customized to their specific needs and goals. Specula is a systematic approach for defining reusable, customizable control components and instantiate them according to different organizational goals and characteristics based on the Quality Improvement Paradigm (QIP) and GQM. This article gives an overview of the Specula approach, including the basic conceptual model, goal-oriented measurement, and the composition of control components based on explicitly stated measurement goals. Related approaches are discussed and the use of Specula as part of industrial case studies is described.

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arXiv2014

An Integrated Approach for Identifying Relevant Factors Influencing Software Development Productivity

Managing software development productivity and effort are key issues in software organizations. Identifying the most relevant factors influencing project performance is essential for implementing business strategies by selecting and adjusting proper improvement activities. There is, however, a large number of potential influencing factors. This paper proposes a novel approach for identifying the most relevant factors influencing software development productivity. The method elicits relevant factors by integrating data analysis and expert judgment approaches by means of a multi-criteria decision support technique. Empirical evaluation of the method in an industrial context has indicated that it delivers a different set of factors compared to individual data- and expert-based factor selection methods. Moreover, application of the integrated method significantly improves the performance of effort estimation in terms of accuracy and precision. Finally, the study did not replicate the observation of similar investigations regarding improved estimation performance on the factor sets reduced by a data-based selection method.

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arXiv2014

Process Evolution Supported by Rationale: An Empirical Investigation of Process Changes

Evolving a software process model without a retrospective and, in consequence, without an understanding of the process evolution, can lead to severe problems for the software development organization, e.g., inefficient performance as a consequence of the arbitrary introduction of changes or difficulty in demonstrating compliance to a given standard. Capturing information on the rationale behind changes can provide a means for better understanding process evolution. This article presents the results of an exploratory study with the goal of understanding the nature of process changes in a given context. It presents the most important issues that motivated process engineers changing important aerospace software process standards during an industrial project. The study is part of research work intended to incrementally define a systematic mechanism for process evolution supported by rationale information.

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arXiv2014

Process Model Difference Analysis for Supporting Process Evolution

Software development processes are subject to variations in time and space, variations that can originate from learning effects, differences in application domains, or a number of other causes. Identifying and analyzing such differences is crucial for a variety of process activities, like defining and evolving process standards, or analyzing the compliance of process models to existing standards, among others. In this paper, we show why appropriately identifying, describing, and visualizing differences between process models in order to support such activities is a highly challenging task. We present scenarios that motivate the need for process model difference analysis, and describe the conceptual and technical challenges arising from them. In addition, we sketch an initial tool-based approach implementing difference analysis, and contrast it with similar existing approaches. The results from this paper constitute the requirements for our ongoing development effort, whose objectives we also describe briefly.

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arXiv2014

Maintaining a Large Process Model Aligned with a Process Standard: An Industrial Example

An essential characteristic of mature software and system development organizations is the definition and use of explicit process models. For a number of reasons, it can be valuable to produce new process models by tailoring existing process standards (such as the V-Modell XT). Both process models and standards evolve over time in order to integrate improvements or adapt the process models to context changes. An important challenge for a process engineering team is to keep tailored process models aligned over time with the standards originally used to produce them. This article presents an approach that supports the alignment of process standards evolving in parallel to derived process models, using an actual industrial example to illustrate the problems and potential solutions. We present and discuss the results of a quantitative analysis done to determine whether a strongly tailored model can still be aligned with its parent standard and to assess the potential cost of such an alignment. We close the paper with conclusions and outlook.

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arXiv2014

Goal-oriented Composition of Software Process Patterns

The development of high-quality software or software-intensive systems requires custom-tailored process models that fit the organizational and project goals as well as the development contexts. These models are a necessary prerequisite for creating project plans that are expected to fulfill business goals. Although project planners require individual process models custom-tailored to their constraints, software or system developing organizations also require generic processes (i.e., reference processes) that capture project-independent knowledge for similar development contexts. The latter is emphazised by assessment approaches (such as CMMI, SPICE) that require explicit process descriptions in order to reach a certain capability or maturity level. Among other concepts such as polymorphism, templates, or generator-based descriptions, software process patterns are used to describe generic process knowledge. Several approaches for describing the architecture of process patterns have already been published (e.g., [7]). However, there is a lack of descriptions on how to compose process patterns for a specific decelopment context in order to gain a custom-tailored process model for a project. This paper focuses on the composition of process patterns in a goal-oriented way. First, the paper describes which information a process pattern should contain so that it can be used for systematic composition. Second, a composition method is sketched. Afterwards, the results of a proof-of-concept evaluation of the method are described. Finally, the paper is summarized and open research questions are sketched.

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arXiv2014

The Secret Life of a Process Description: A Look into the Evolution of a Large Process Model

Software process models must change continuously in order to remain consistent over time with the reality they represent, as well as relevant to the task they are intended for. Performing these changes in a sound and disci- plined fashion requires software process model evolution to be understood and controlled. The current situation can be characterized by a lack of understanding of software process model evolution and, in consequence, by a lack of systematic support for evolving software process models in organizations. This paper presents an analysis of the evolution of a large software process standard, namely, the process standard for the German Federal Government (V-Modell(R) XT). The analysis was performed with the Evolyzer tool suite, and is based on the complete history of over 600 versions that have been created during the development and maintenance of the standard. The analysis reveals similarities and differences between process evolution and empirical findings in the area of software system evolution. These findings provide hints on how to better manage process model evolution in the future.

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arXiv2014

Lessons Learned and Results from Applying Data-Driven Cost Estimation to Industrial Data Sets

The increasing availability of cost-relevant data in industry allows companies to apply data-intensive estimation methods. However, available data are often inconsistent, invalid, or incomplete, so that most of the existing data-intensive estimation methods cannot be applied. Only few estimation methods can deal with imperfect data to a certain extent (e.g., Optimized Set Reduction, OSR(c)). Results from evaluating these methods in practical environments are rare. This article describes a case study on the application of OSR(c) at Toshiba Information Systems (Japan) Corporation. An important result of the case study is that estimation accuracy significantly varies with the data sets used and the way of preprocessing these data. The study supports current results in the area of quantitative cost estimation and clearly illustrates typical problems. Experiences, lessons learned, and recommendations with respect to data preprocessing and data-intensive cost estimation in general are presented.

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arXiv2014

A Rule-based Model for Customized Risk Identification in Distributed Software Development Projects

Many project risks in distributed software development are very different from the ones in collocated development and therefore are often overlooked. At the same time, they depend to a large extent on project-specific characteristics. This article presents a model for identifying risks early in a project. This model systematically captures experiences from past projects and is based on a set of logical rules describing how project characteristics influence typical risks in distributed development. Thus, the model is able to assess risks individually for each project. It was developed by applying qualitative content analysis to 19 interviews with practitioners. An evaluation using expert interviews showed that the risks identified by the model matched the actual experiences in 81% of the cases; of these, 40% have not been regarded yet at project start. The article describes the concepts of the model, its instantiation and evaluation, followed by a conclusion and future work.

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arXiv2014

Estimating the Effort Overhead in Global Software Development

Models for effort and cost estimation are important for distributed software development as well as for collocated software and system development. Standard cost models only insufficiently consider the characteristics of distributed development such as dissimilar abilities at the different sites or significant overhead due to remote collaboration. Therefore, explicit cost models for distributed development are needed. In this article, we present the initial development of a cost overhead model for a Spanish global software development organization. The model was developed using the CoBRA approach for cost estimation. As a result, cost drivers for the specific distributed development context were identified and their impact was quantified on an empirical basis. The article presents related work, an overview of the approach, and its application in the industrial context. Finally, we sketch the inclusion of the model in an approach for systematic task allocation and give an overview of future work.

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arXiv2014

Predicting Defect Content and Quality Assurance Effectiveness by Combining Expert Judgment and Defect Data - A Case Study

Planning quality assurance (QA) activities in a systematic way and controlling their execution are challenging tasks for companies that develop software or software-intensive systems. Both require estimation capabilities regarding the effectiveness of the applied QA techniques and the defect content of the checked artifacts. Existing approaches for these purposes need extensive measurement data from historical projects. Due to the fact that many companies do not collect enough data for applying these approaches (especially for the early project lifecycle), they typically base their QA planning and controlling solely on expert opinion. This article presents a hybrid method that combines commonly available measurement data and context-specific expert knowledge. To evaluate the method's applicability and usefulness, we conducted a case study in the context of independent verification and validation activities for critical software in the space domain. A hybrid defect content and effectiveness model was developed for the software requirements analysis phase and evaluated with available legacy data. One major result is that the hybrid model provides improved estimation accuracy when compared to applicable models based solely on data. The mean magnitude of relative error (MMRE) determined by cross-validation is 29.6% compared to 76.5% obtained by the most accurate data-based model.

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arXiv2014

Capturing Evidence From Wireless Internet Services Development

The merging of the Internet with the Wireless services domain has created a potential market whose characteristics are new technologies and time-to-market pressure. The lack of knowledge about new technologies and the need to be competitive in a short time demand that software organizations learn quickly about this domain and its characteristics. Additionally, the effects of development techniques in this context need to be understood. Learning from previous experiences in such a changing environment demands a clear understanding of the evidence to be captured, and how it could be used in the future. This article presents definitions of quantitative and qualitative evidence, and templates for capturing such evidence in a systematic way. Such templates were used in the context of two pilot projects dealing with the development of Wireless Internet Services.

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arXiv2014

Aligning Software-related Strategies in Multi-Organizational Settings

Aligning the activities of an organization with its business goals is a challenging task that is critical for success. Alignment in a multi-organizational setting requires the integration of different internal or external organizational units. The anticipated benefits of multi-organizational alignment consist of clarified contributions and increased transparency of the involved organizational units. The GQM+Strategies approach provides mechanisms for explicitly linking goals and strategies within an organization and is based on goal-oriented measurement. This paper presents the process and first-hand experience of applying GQM+Strategies in a multi-organizational setting from the aerospace industry. Additionally, the resulting GQM+Strategies grid is sketched and selected parts are discussed. Finally, the results are reflected on and an overview of future work is given.

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