One important component of a software process is the organizational context in which the process is enacted. This component is often missing or incomplete in current process modeling approaches. One technique for modeling this perspective is the Actor-Dependency (AD) Model. This paper reports on a case study which used this approach to analyze and assess a large software maintenance organization. Our goal was to identify the approach's strengths and weaknesses while providing practical recommendations for improvement. The AD model was found to be very useful in capturing the important properties of the organizational context of the maintenance process, and aided in the understanding of the flaws found in this process. However, a number of opportunities for extending and improving the AD model were identified. Among others, there is a need to incorporate quantitative information to complement the qualitative model. 1. Introduction It has now been recognized that, in order to improve the...

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Process-centered software engineering environments are expected to improve an individual's comprehension of work activities, as well as improve communication and reduce conflicts among teams of software developers. We chose to investigate individual responses when using such an environment before looking for a group response. A controlled experiment compared off-line and on-line implementations of measurement-based process guidance to test three hypotheses: first, individuals accomplish their work more efficiently when using on-line process guidance as compared to offline guidance; second, individuals are willing to use an on-line system for guidance; and third, individuals adjust their behavior based on quantitative quality models. The 20 subjects worked alone on two testing exercises. Subjects used either an off-line or an on-line guidance technique during the first exercise, and the other technique during the second exercise. The results did not confirm the hypotheses. On average, s...

Measurement is a necessary prerequisite for software process improvement. However, few guidelines exist for systematic planning of measurement programs within software projects. We advocate beginning with goal-oriented measurement as expressed in the GQM paradigm. When applying GQM, meaningful refinement of measurement goals requires a deep understanding of the organization's software development processes. Software process modeling can act as a means to gain this understanding. We provide guidelines that state how software processes should be modeled in order to support the introduction of measurement in a software project. The process models are used to derive non-intrusive data collection procedures that satisfy the needs of multiple measurement goals and thereby minimize the data collection overhead. Finally, we present the lessons learned from jointly applying software process modeling and measurement technologies in two industrial software projects. 1. Introduction Continuous sof...

Software development organizations measure their real-world processes, products, and resources to achieve the goal of improving their practices. Accurate and useful measurement relies on explicit models of the real-world processes, products, and resources. These explicit models assist with planning measurement, interpreting data, and assisting developers with their work. However, little work has been done on the joint use of measurement and process technologies. We hypothesize that it is possible to integrate measurement and process technologies in a way that supports automation of measurement-based feedback. Automated support for measurementbased feedback means that software developers and maintainers are provided with on-line, detailed information about their work. This type of automated support is expected to help software professionals gain intellectual control over their software projects. The dissertation offers three major contributions. First, an integrated measurement and process modeling framework was constructed. This framework establishes the necessary foundation for integrating measurement and process technologies in a way that will permit automation. Second, a process-centered software engineering environment was developed to support measurement-based feedback. This system provides personnel with information about the tasks expected of them based on an integrated set of measurement and process views. Third, a set of assumptions and requirements about that system were examined in a controlled experiment. The experiment compared the use of different levels of automation to evaluate the acceptance and effectiveness of measurement-based feedback. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Victor R. Basili, for offering me the chance to work with one of the pioneers in empirical research in software engineering. I greatly enjoyed my years at Maryland, and was especially glad to have cooperated with members of the Software

All software projects are experiments in the sense of the scientific method because the outcomes are not known in advance, theories and hypotheses may be tested in the project empirically, and data must be collected and analyzed. Empirical data allows us to characterize projects, gauge improvements in an environment, and reason about the value of new technologies. This paper discusses our ideas about practical support for collecting empirical data using a process-sensitive software engineering environment. Introduction The scientific method instructs us to improve our understanding of the world around us by formulating theories and hypotheses, running experiments to test the hypotheses empirically, and analyzing the data gathered during the experiments. The Quality Improvement Paradigm [1] tailors the scientific method for the software engineering domain and instructs us to treat each software project as an experiment. All software projects are experiments in the sense of the scient...

SMP is a project management tool specifically designed for process-oriented software projects. It integrates six project management functions: process modelling, effort estimation, planning, tracking, control and measurement. Their integration is based on three basic principles: i) a project plan should follow from a process model; ii) effort estimation should be based on project historical data; iii) control should be based on units that can be tracked across several phases and activities. SMP is inspired from Watt's Humphrey Personal Software Process, which has been lifted to deal with large projects instead of personal projects.

This paper argues that software measurement and the software development process are mutually dependent. Firstly, a high-level view of the relationship between measurement and the development process is taken. This view shows where the various activities within software measurement are positioned within the context of the high-level project stages. The topic of process modelling is introduced, and is used to develop a lower-level view of measurement integration with process. This shows that process models for measurement integration should be sufficiently fine-grained to show when measurements should be collected, how they should be collected, who should collect then, and how the results will be used (the usual lifecycle models are too coarse-grain to achieve this). It is also shown that measurement can be most easily integrated within an automated environment, as measurement collection should itself be automated. The initial work on the...

Abstract — To consistently improve software quality management, greater automation and tighter integration of quality tools and measurements in the software engineering environment is essential. However, automation of software quality management faces numerous challenges such as project uniqueness, project dynamics, efficiency, and limited time and quality expenditures. In this paper, an approach is proposed that extends the Goal-Question-Metric technique and automates the monitoring of quality goals via a multi-agent system by using competitive bidding agent behavior for proactive vs. cooperative voting for reactive measures. The preliminary results show promise for systematically harmonizing (conflicting) quality attributes, goals, metrics, and countermeasures and for automating aspects of software quality management. Keywords-software quality management; agents; Goal-Question-Metric technique; automated software engineering; software engineering environments I.