ICSSP 2011
International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP 2011)
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International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP 2011), May 21–22, 2011, Waikiki, Honolulu, HI, USA

ICSSP 2011 – Proceedings

Contents - Abstracts - Authors

Preface

Title Page


Foreword
Welcome to the International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP 2011) held in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, on May 21-22, 2011. Since the first conference in 2007, the precursor ICSP conference series has established its place in the software engineering community as a respected conference focusing on research and practice related to software development process.

Keynotes

Software and Systems Engineering Process Implications of Evolutionary Development (Keynote Abstract)
Barry W. Boehm
(University of Southern California, USA)
The increasingly rapid pace of change in technology, competition, and IT demand have made evolutionary development an attractive alternative to traditional software and systems engineering (S&SE) processes. There are several forms of evolutionary development, and there is no one-size-fits-all S&SE approach that is best for all situations. For rapid-fielding situations, an easiest-first, get something working, evolutionary S&SE approach is best. But for enduring systems, an easiest-first evolutionary S&SE approach is likely to produce an unscalable system whose architecture is incompatible with achieving high levels of safety and security. Also, evolutionary development requires much higher sustained levels of systems engineering (SE) effort, earlier and continuous integration and test, pro-active approaches to address sources of system change, greater levels of concurrent engineering, and achievement reviews based on evidence of feasibility vs. evidence of plans, activity, and system descriptions. Many traditional acquisition practices are incompatible with effective SE of evolutionary development. These include assumptions that full-capability requirements can be specified up front along with associated full-capability plans, budgets, schedules, work breakdown structures, and earned-value management targets; that most systems engineers can be dismissed after PDR; and that all forms of requirements change or “creep” should be discouraged. The study also found that other inhibitors to effective SE need to be addressed, such as underbudgeting (SE is the first victim of inadequate budgets); contracting provisions emphasizing functional definition before addressal of key performance parameters; and management temptations to show rapid progress on easy initial increments while deferring the hard parts until later increments.

Ubiquitous Process: An Opportunity or Temptation? (Keynote Abstract)
Ross Jeffery
(NICTA, Australia)
This talk reflects on different types of research into process carried out within the software and systems engineering community in recent years. For example, work in the domains of business process, medical systems, electrical systems and software development is considered. Extensive research at NICTA on business processes in the LIXI project as well as activities with the Australian Department of Defence, amongst others, are used to provide substantial experience and insight into both the opportunities for software and systems engineering research and the insalubrious temptations that may face researchers working in this area.

Software and Systems Process Analysis

Optimizing Cost and Quality by Integrating Inspection and Test Processes
Frank Elberzhager, Jürgen Münch, Dieter Rombach, and Bernd Freimut
(Fraunhofer IESE, Germany; University of Helsinki, Finland; University of Kaiserslautern, Germany; Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany)
Inspections and testing are two of the most commonly performed software quality assurance processes today. Typically, these processes are applied in isolation, which, however, fails to exploit the benefits of systematically combining and integrating them. Expected benefits of such process integration are higher defect detection rates or reduced quality assurance effort. Moreover, when conducting testing without any prior information regarding the system’s quality, it is often unclear which parts or which defect types should be prioritized. Existing approaches do not explicitly use information from inspections in a systematical way to focus testing processes. In this article, we present an integrated two-stage approach that routes inspection data to test processes in order to prioritize code classes and defect types. While an initial version of the approach focused on prioritizing code classes, this article focuses on the prioritization of defect types for testing. Results from a case study where the approach was applied on the code level show that those defect types could be prioritized before the testing that afterwards actually showed up most often during the test process. In addition, an overview of related work and an outlook on future research directions are given.

A Value-Based Review Process for Prioritizing Artifacts
Qi Li, Barry W. Boehm, Ye Yang, and Qing Wang
(University of Southern California, USA; The Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)
As a new contribution to Value-based V&V process development, a systematic and multi-criteria process is proposed to quantitatively determine the Value-based V&V artifact priority that reviewers can follow for their reviews. This process enables reviewers to prioritize artifacts to be reviewed in a more cost-effective way based on more sophisticated and comprehensive factors, such as importance, quality risks, dependency and cost of V&V investments. Some qualitative and quantitative evidence is provided from a comparative experiment with 22 real-client e-services projects over two years of a graduate software engineering team-project course. It shows that the value-based artifact prioritization enabled reviewers to better focus on artifacts with high importance and risks, to capture issues with high impact in a timely manner, and to improve the cost-effectiveness of reviews.

Analyzing Software Process Models with AVISPA
Julio A. Hurtado Alegría, María Cecilia Bastarrica, and Alexandre Bergel
(University of Cauca, Colombia; Universidad de Chile, Chile)
Software process models are sophisticated and large specifications aimed at organizing and managing software development. Their formal specification demands an enormous effort, but once specified there are few approaches and even fewer tools that aid the process engineer to analyze the quality of the process. For the last five years we have aided software companies in specifying their software processes and we have found a series of error patterns that indicate the potential presence of misconceptions or misspecifications. This paper presents these patterns, characterizes the kinds of errors they potentially reveal, and details how errors could be localized within a software process model. To assist process engineers to analyze the quality of their processes, we provide AVISPA, a tool that graphically renders different aspects of a process model and highlights potential errors as intuitive and comprehensible indicators. The approach and the supporting tool are illustrated by applying them for analyzing the software process models of three Chilean software companies.

Software Process in MDE

Toward a Comparable Characterization for Software Development Activities in Context of MDE
Regina Hebig, Andreas Seibel, and Holger Giese
(Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, Germany)
Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) mixes up manual activities, like coding or modeling, with automated activities, such as transformation or generation steps, which can lead to constraints on the development process. Currently, we know little about such constraints. For gaining more knowledge about this it is necessary to capture and compare MDE activities from practice to identify reoccurring structures that can be associated to constraints on the software development process. However, current techniques to capture MDE activities are not sufficient for comparison. Therefore, we developed a new approach to characterize activities based on relations between consumed and produced artifacts. Further, we evaluated this approach by applying it to activities from industrial case studies. Thereby, we found that our approach is applicable to capture complex industrial activities and that the identification of reoccurring structures is possible. These results enable future research about the influence of MDE activities on software development processes.

An MDE Approach to Software Process Tailoring
Julio A. Hurtado Alegría, María Cecilia Bastarrica, Alcides Quispe, and Sergio F. Ochoa
(University of Cauca, Colombia; Universidad de Chile, Chile)
Defining organizational processes is essential for enhancing maturity. However the best process depends on the particularities of each project. Typically a process engineer defines a specific process for each project in an ad-hoc fashion, which is expensive, unrepeatable and error prone. Trying to deal with this challenge we propose a model-based approach to software process tailoring that generates project specific processes based on the organizational process and the project context. The approach is systematic, repeatable and it does not depend on the people using it. The proposal has been applied for tailoring the Requirements Engineering process of a medium size company. The obtained results were validated by process engineers of the company. Processes obtained using the proposed approach matched the ones used in the company for planned contexts and also they were reasonable for non-expected situations.

Model based Analysis Process for Embedded Software Product Lines
Lorea Belategi, Goiuria Sagardui, and Leire Etxeberria
(Mondragon Unibertsitatea, Spain)
Nowadays, embedded system development is increasing its complexity dealing with quality, cost and time-to-market among others. Quality attributes are an important issue to consider in embedded software development where time issues may be critical. Development paradigms such as Model Driven Development and Software Product Lines can be an adequate alternative to traditional software development and validation methods due to the characteristics of embedded systems. But for a proper validation and verification based on MARTE model analysis, all variability issues and critical quality attributes that take part in analysis must be properly modelled and managed. Therefore, a model analysis process for Model Driven Embedded Software Product Lines has been defined as some process lacks have been found.

Knowledge Mining in Software Process

Defect Prediction Using Social Network Analysis on Issue Repositories
Serdar Biçer, Ayşe Başar Bener, and Bora Çağlayan
(Gerger Consulting, Turkey; Ryerson University, Canada; Bogazici University, Turkey)
People are the most important pillar of software development process. It is critical to understand how they interact with each other and how these interactions affect the quality of the end product in terms of defects. In this research we propose to include a new set of metrics, a.k.a. social network metrics on issue repositories in predicting defects. Social network metrics on issue repositories has not been used before to predict defect proneness of a software product. To validate our hypotheses we used two datasets, development data of IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) and Drupal, to conduct our experiments. The results of the experiments revealed that compared to other set of metrics such as churn metrics using social network metrics on issue repositories either considerably decreases high false alarm rates without compromising the detection rates or considerably increases low prediction rates without compromising low false alarm rates. Therefore we recommend practitioners to collect social network metrics on issue repositories since people related information is a strong indicator of past patterns in a given team.

Automatic Mining of Change Set Size Information from Repository for Precise Productivity Estimation
Hui Huang, Qiusong Yang, Junchao Xiao, and Jian Zhai
(Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)
Productivity is a crucial concern for most software organizations. It can help project managers to make project plan, supervise project progress, and measure the project members’ performance. Thus it has been widely measured and analyzed by both industry and researchers. But in the actual software project management, the project data filled by the developers may be incomplete and imprecise. Especially it is very hard for the developers to give the precise work product scale of each task. Therefore, the productivity calculated basing on those data is also imprecise. To solve the problem, this paper presents a method for precise productivity estimation. The method calculates work product scale of each task using change set size information by rebuilding relationships between the tasks and the SVN commits, and then calculates the productivity. And an experimental study has been done basing on Qone. Qone is an integrated system for project management developed by Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS). It has been used in more than 200 software companies in China.

To Branch or Not to Branch?
Rahul Premraj, Antony Tang, Nico Linssen, Hub Geraats, and Hans van Vliet
(VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands; Océ Technologies, Netherlands)
The study of Software Configuration Management (SCM) has so far focused on the use of tools, SCM models, strategies, patterns or best practices. There are few industry studies on how an organization actually practices file branching and merging. In this empirical study at Océ, we have observed that some developers create branches freely without regards to their consequences on merging. This contradicts recommended best practices and SCM processes. So we investigate if there are hidden costs in propagating or merging changes at Océ. The investigation led us to understand that branching and merging can be done freely under certain circumstances to provide development concurrency. However, some files cannot be branched freely and it may be better to use recommended practices to edit them. Some roles were also noted to be more affected by branching of files.

Empirical Studies

An Empirical Characterization of the Accuracy of Software Process Elicitation
Carlton A. Crabtree, Anthony F. Norcio, and Carolyn B. Seaman
(University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA)
Process models are often the basis for demonstrating compliance and recommending improvement in software engineering organizations. A descriptive model is a type of process model describing the human activities in software development that actually occur. The purpose of a descriptive model is to provide a baseline for further process improvement and analysis. Ideally, a descriptive model provides an explicit representation. However, if the descriptive model does not represent how a process is actually performed, subsequent recommendations for improvement may be based upon information that is depicted in the model but that does not actually take place. Similarly, a descriptive model may omit important information that is centrally relevant for an organization’s process improvement goals. The accuracy of software process elicitation is an important measure and is the degree a descriptive model reflects an actual process in the real world. This study, informed by a synthesis of arguments from related literature, characterizes the accuracy of software process elicitation as the perception of error for a descriptive model. We collected data from 48 users in professional training settings using a between subjects design. The results suggest that users in the treatment group perceived significantly higher error.

How Does an Agile Coaching Team Work? A Case Study
Maria Paasivaara and Casper Lassenius
(Aalto University, Finland)
This paper presents a case study on building a successful agile coaching team focusing on distributed software development projects in a global software company. We describe how the team of eight coaches was built, how the coaches work as a team, how the coaches work with their customer projects, what the main benefits of coaching have been for the customer projects, and the main challenges on building the coaching activities. The data was gathered by 13 semi-structured interviews of the coaching team members, as well as the interviews with personnel from four coached customer projects.

Towards an Understanding of Tailoring Scrum in Global Software Development: A Multi-case Study
Emam Hossain, Paul L. Bannerman, and Ross Jeffery
(The University of New South Wales, Australia; NICTA, Australia)
There is growing interest in applying Scrum practices in Global Software Development to leverage the advantages of both. However, the effective use of Scrum practices largely depends on close interactions between project stakeholders. The distribution of project stakeholders in GSD provides significant challenges related to project collaboration processes that may limit the use of Scrum. However, project managers increasingly seek to use the Scrum model in their distributed projects. While there is an emerging body of industrial experience, there are limited empirical studies that discuss Scrum tailoring in GSD. The paper reports a multi-case study that investigates the impact of key project contextual factors on the use of Scrum practices in GSD. This study is relevant to researchers and practitioners who are seeking ways to use Scrum in GSD and improve project effectiveness.

Software Process Improvement

Reuse and Product-orientation as Key Elements for Systems Engineering: Aligning a Reference Model for the Industrial Solutions Business with ISO/IEC 15288
Fritz Stallinger, Robert Neumann, Jan Vollmar, and Reinhold Plösch
(Software Competence Center Hagenberg, Austria; Siemens AG, Germany; Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria)
Industrial engineering can be regarded as a specialization of systems engineering. It deals with the engineering of industrial solutions, e.g. power plants or airport logistics systems. In today’s competitive environment, the industrial solutions business faces high cost and productivity pressure, increasing complexity, and highly demanding customers. Transforming this business from the project-focused development of highly customer-specific solutions to the customization of a ‘solution product’ and fostering reuse in general are judged highly rewarding approaches to tackle these challenges. As a consequence, an ISO/IEC 15504 conformant process reference model for the industrial solutions business has been proposed, based on the integration of a process reference model for reuse in industrial engineering and a product-oriented process model for the engineering of industrial solutions. In this paper we present the results of analyzing this reference model against the international standard ISO/IEC 15288 on systems life cycle processes. The results of the mapping of these models are analyzed to identify further enhancements of the reference model for the industrial solutions business, and for identifying potential directions for the further evolution of the international standard.

Strategy to Improve Quality for Software Applications: A Process View
Pablo Becker, Philip Lew, and Luis Olsina
(Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, Argentina; Beihang University, China)
Each organization devoted to developing software/web applications should have as one of its ultimate goals to improve the quality in use of its products. In order to accomplish this, first it has to understand the quality of the current product version and then make appropriate changes to increase the quality of the new version if improvement actions were needed. For this purpose, we have developed a specific strategy called SIQinU (Strategy for understanding and Improving Quality in Use), which allows recognizing problems of quality in use through evaluation and proposes product improvements by understanding and making changes on product attributes. Hence by re-evaluating quality in use of the new version, improvement gains can be gauged. SIQinU is in alignment with GOCAME (Goal-Oriented Context-Aware Measurement and Evaluation), a multi-purpose generic strategy previously developed for measurement and evaluation which relies on: a conceptual framework (with ontological base), a process, and methods and tools. Since the process aspect is paramount in defining SIQinU –given the amount of phases and activities-, in this paper we model the functional and behavioral process views illustrating them with excerpts of a real case study.

A Competency Framework for the Stakeholders of a Software Process Improvement Initiative
Ismael Edrein Espinosa-Curiel, Josefina Rodríguez-Jacobo, and José Alberto Fernández-Zepeda
(Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education of Ensenada, Mexico)


Agile Processes

Agile Development with Security Engineering Activities
Dejan Baca and Bengt Carlsson
(Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden)
Agile software development has been used by industry to create a more flexible and lean software development process, i.e making it possible to develop software at a faster rate and with more agility during development. There are however concerns that the higher development pace and lack of documentation are creating less secure software. We have therefore looked at three known Security Engineering processes, Microsoft SDL, Cigatel touchpoints and Common Criteria and identified what specific security activities they performed. We then compared these activities with an Agile development process that is used in industry. Developers, from a large telecommunication manufacturer, were interviewed to learn their impressions on using these security activities in an agile development process. We produced a security enhanced Agile development process that we present in this paper. This new Agile process use activities from already established security engineering processes that provide the benefit the developers wanted but did not hinder or obstruct the Agile process in a significant way.

Developer-Driven Big-Bang Process Transition from Scrum to Kanban
Natalja Nikitina and Mira Kajko-Mattsson
(Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
Even if most of the software process transitions have been made with the goal of improving software processes, only few experience reports recognize process transition as an important element of software process improvement. This paper reports on a developer-driven Big-Bang process transition from Scrum to Kanban, and recognizes it as part of process improvement effort in one software development company. The paper reports on the transition process, changes done to the process and results achieved. It rounds up with an initial model of a process transition, lessons learned from the process transition effort and suggestions for future work.

Strategically Balanced Process Adoption
Hesam Chiniforooshan Esfahani, Eric Yu, and Maria Carmela Annosi
(University of Toronto, Canada; Ericsson Telecomunicazioni Sp.A., Italy)
Software processes have an important role to play in realizing organizational strategies. When a software organization is about to decide on the adoption of a new process, it should have a clear understanding of its own strategic objectives, as well as the potentials of the new method in supporting or hindering its strategic plan. From this perspective, a successful process adoption initiative is one which provides maximum support to the strategic objectives of an organization while producing a minimum of adverse effects. This paper introduces the concept of Strategically Balanced Process Adoption (SBPA) for anticipating and monitoring the strategic impacts of a new process before and after its adoption. A set of techniques are proposed for the realization of SBPA, which are based on a repository of method fragments, introduced in an earlier ICSP paper. The proposed techniques are deployed in an industrial experience, where the subject organization was about to adopt a custom-designed agile process. The proposed techniques of SBPA helped the subject organization to better design the to-be process, with improved control over its enactment.

Business Process

Requirements for Process Management Support: Experience from the Japanese Aerospace Industry
Martin Kowalczyk, Ove Armbrust, Masafumi Katahira, Tatsuya Kaneko, Yuko Miyamoto, and Yumi Koishi
(Fraunhofer IESE, Germany; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Japan)
In recent years, software process management has been a major topic in research and industry. But only few of the proposed research approaches have been transferred into industrial practice and significant challenges remain in practice. Today organizations have to deal with complex process model hierarchies, which are often used in a distributed collaboration context. This experience report outlines current practitioners’ requirements regarding software process management and their use to evaluate and select a suitable technology to support the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s software process management activities.

Goal-Driven Evaluation of Process Fragments Using Weighted Dependency Graphs
Thomas Birkhölzer, Hesam Chiniforooshan Esfahani, Christoph Dickmann, Jürgen Vaupel, and Stefan Ast
(University of Applied Sciences Konstanz, Germany; University of Toronto, Canada; Siemens Healthcare, Germany; Siemens CT, Germany)


Defense Acquisition System Simulation Studies
Joseph R. Wirthlin, Daniel X. Houston, and Raymond J. Madachy ORCID logo
(Air Force Institute of Technology, USA; The Aerospace Corporation, USA; Naval Postgraduate School, USA)
A systems engineering process model for the acquisition of large, complex systems for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is being adapted for ongoing experiments in acquisition process policies. The discrete‐event simulation model of the larger “enterprise of acquisition” for weapon systems has a broad scope from program beginning through development. It reveals some of the challenges and risks in weapon system acquisition. Initially the model was used to evaluate potential policies as interventions and/or system changes in an Air Force context. The simulation results showed varying degrees of influence on program outcomes and suggested no single antidote exists for solving acquisition problems. Many of the negative outcomes reflected through cost and schedule overruns are due to the behavior of the acquisition system itself. A collaboration between the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), and The Aerospace Corporation is underway to translate the model and adapt it for new considerations. Shortly we will propagate new model versions and results to the public, and use it for additional Air Force and Navy programs of concern.

GoPoMoSA: A Goal-Oriented Process Modeling and Simulation Advisor
Xu Bai, LiGuo Huang, He Zhang, and Alexander Egyed
(Southern Methodist University, USA; NICTA, Australia; University of New South Wales, Australia; Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria)
This paper presents GoPoMoSA, a Goal-oriented Process Modeling and Simulation Advisor that semi-automatically discovers suitable Software Process Modeling and Simulation (SPMS) techniques for (inexperienced) process modelers to achieve their process modeling goals. GoPoMoSA takes the goal-oriented modeling approach that captures the associations among Process Modeling Stakeholder goals and existing SPMS techniques via Relevant Process Elements modeled in the knowledge graphs. We evaluated the accuracy and feasibility of GoPoMoSA with data collected from 212 published SPMS literatures and a real-world process modeling and simulation case on requirements traceability. Our results show that GoPoMoSA (1) was able to find suitable SPMS techniques based on stakeholder goals with an average of 85.38% accuracy; (2) helped novice process modelers effectively and efficiently achieve their goals.

Formally Founded, Plan-based Enactment of Software Development Processes
Jan Friedrich and Klaus Bergner
(TU München, Germany; 4Soft GmbH, Germany)
The management of a software development project is a demanding task. To plan and control the actions of the project participants, the existence of a suitable project plan is of critical importance. However, elaborating and maintaining such a project plan based on the employed process model typically requires a lot of manual effort, comprising many tedious and error-prone activities. This paper shows how plan-based enactment of processes can improve this situation, providing a basis for adequate method and tool support. The paper presents our approach for an integrated formal model covering process models, project plans and real life project actions. The model is simple, has a well-defined semantics and supports initial planning as well as plan refinement, re-planning and controlling. Furthermore, the paper sketches how the model can be put to practice and integrated into existing tools.

Software Process

Understanding how Novices are Integrated in a Team Analysing their Tool Usage
Ilenia Fronza, Alberto Sillitti, Giancarlo Succi, and Jelena Vlasenko
(Free University of Bozen, Italy)
developers. The analysis of tool usage can propose early insights on novices integration in the team and also provide a method to compare their activities with experts. In this work we compare novices and experts in terms of tool usage, both in solo and in Pair Programming (PP). At the end of the integration process, novices activities are aligned to experts ones. Data for this study have been collected in an industrial team of 17 developers for a period of 10 months. The usage of AISEMA (Automated In- Process Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis) systems allowed us to have continuous, accurate and low cost measurement for our analysis.

Experiences Mining Open Source Release Histories
Jason Tsay, Hyrum K. Wright, and Dewayne E. Perry
(CMU, USA; University of Texas at Austin, USA)
Software releases form a critical part of the life cycle of a software project. Typically, each project produces releases in its own way, using various methods of versioning, archiv- ing, announcing and publishing the release. Understanding the release history of a software project can shed light on the project history, as well as the release process used by that project, and how those processes change. However, many factors make automating the retrieval of release history in- formation difficult, such as the many sources of data, a lack of relevant standards and a disparity of tools used to create releases.
In spite of the large amount of raw data available, no at- tempt has been made to create a release history database of a large number of projects in the open source ecosys- tem. This paper presents our experiences, including the tools, techniques and pitfalls, in our early work to create a software release history database which will be of use to future researchers who want to study and model the release engineering process in greater depth.

Towards Detailed Software Artifact Specification with SPEMArti
Marcos Silva and Toacy Oliveira
(Pontofical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Software Artifacts are key elements to software development processes as they ultimately gather all the information required to specify, develop and maintain a software-based system. Currently software artifacts are treated as loosely structured documents that are easy to use but hard to be manipulated by programs. In this work we present our approach to Software Artifact Authoring based on UML models to better organize the specification of documents derived from software development processes. The approach uses the concept of meta-modeling to define the Artifact Layer and the Process Layer. The former allows the specification of documents in general while the latter focus on software process documents exclusively. We also illustrate how our approach can be used to create structured artifacts.

The Problem of Private Information in Large Software Organizations
Jonathan L. Krein, Patrick Wagstrom, Stanley M. Sutton, Jr., Clay Williams, and Charles D. Knutson
(Brigham Young University, USA; IBM Research Watson, USA)
Coordination of project stakeholders is critical to timely and consistent software delivery. In this short paper we present the problem of private information as a guiding framework or lens through which to interpret coordination dynamics within software organizations. We provide evidence of this problem in the form of specific challenges, collected via interviews from a diverse set of extended (i.e., non-development) stakeholders in a globally distributed software development organization.

Concepts in the Definition of an Enterprise Development Process
Stanley M. Sutton, Jr.
(IBM Research Watson, USA)


Panel Session: Towards a Rich Process Manifesto

Special Panel: Towards a Manifesto for Rich Process Models
Andreas Rausch and Marco Kuhrmann
(TU Clausthal, Germany; TU München, Germany)
In the agile community, there is a strong commitment to the few and simple principles and values that are collected in the agile manifesto. Those are a common guideline and a value system for agile methods. Rich process models suffer in having such principles and values. In this special panel, we aim at initiating a discussion on commonly agreed principles and values in rich process models, and at starting the work on a "Manifesto for Rich Process Models".

A Proposal for Principles and Values from the Perspective of the German Standard IT-Development Process V-Modell XT
Andreas Rausch and Marco Kuhrmann
(TU Clausthal, Germany; TU München, Germany)
The V-Modell XT is the standard software development process for IT-projects in the German government. For federal agencies, this process is mandatory to manage internal IT-projects, as well as to coordinate projects of third-party suppliers. The non-profit organization “WEIT e.V.” maintains the further development of the process model and provides official and industrial process owners with services. The process model is designed as a process line. Therefore the further development needs to be handled with care. In this position paper, we present the values that were chosen mandatory for the process’s further development. We also motivate values that we consider relevant for rich process models in general.

Towards Richer Process Principles
Barry W. Boehm
(University of Southern California, USA)
Today’s and tomorrow’s complex, interdependent, dynamic systems require richer process principles than the simplistic principles in the Agile Manifesto or in simplistic sequential waterfall or Vee models. The resulting principles should capitalize on the strengths of these while avoiding their weaknesses.

A Plea for Lean Software Process Models
Philippe Kruchten
(University of British Columbia, Canada)
Over the last 30 years we have tried very hard s the rich process models approach, and we have not been extremely successful at it. Maybe we should try lean and mean software process models, rather than making them “richer.” At minimum, we should try to analyze why the rich approaches have not worked; where they failed. Could it be that we were trying to solve the wrong problem? or that the real problems by far overshadow the process model issue? Or maybe the whole construction paradigm we use for software development is not suitable anymore? My position is that we should try the route of very simple software process models, to ensure a wider applicability, greater versatility, and acceptance. Possibly these new process models would be based on other paradigms of software or system development than the “technical-rational” construction idea. I would be wary of richer process models.

The Right Process For Each Context: Objective Evidence Needed
Ove Armbrust and Dieter Rombach
(Fraunhofer IESE, Germany)
The growing importance of software in ever more technical systems has led to new demands with respect to developing software. The demand for more functionality, higher quality, and faster delivery hence poses major challenges to the software industry. The software process community has responded with a variety of different development processes such as the waterfall model or the incremental commitment model, however, the number of late or failed projects has not decreased as much as it was desired. In the new millennium, agile development approaches promised a new way out of this dilemma. After several years of heated discussions, it is now time to evaluate applicability, advantages, and challenges of different software development approaches based on sound, empirical evidence instead of anecdotes and hearsay. This paper briefly investigates the major differences between agile and traditional approaches, illustrates the difficulties in selecting the “right” approach for a given project, and proposes hypotheses for empirical evaluation, in order to build a solid body of knowledge that can be used for said selection.

A Manifesto for Effective Process Models
William R. Nichols, Patrick Kirwan, and Urs Andelfinger
(SEI/CMU, USA; SEI Europe GmbH, Germany)
Effective process models, to result in effective processes, must be adapted to the unique needs of an organization. When done carefully, proper adaptation produces superior results. This article includes examples of successful application of process in different domains and scales. From these come a list of values and principles for effective process use.

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