8 pages, 6 figures, This is a preliminary version of a paper submitted and accepted at: Software Engineering Conference Russia (SECR 2018). Moscow, Russia, October 12-13, 2018
Cryptocurrencies and their foundation technology, the Blockchain, are reshaping finance and economics, allowing a decentralized approach enabling trusted applications with no trusted counterpart. More recently, the Blockchain and the programs running on it, called Smart Contracts, are also finding more and more applications in all fields requiring trust and sound certifications. Some people have come to the point of saying that the "Blockchain revolution" can be compared to that of the Internet and the Web in their early days. As a result, all the software development revolving around the Blockchain technology is growing at a staggering rate. The feeling of many software engineers about such huge interest in Blockchain technologies is that of unruled and hurried software development, a sort of competition on a first-come-first-served basis which does not assure neither software quality, nor that the basic concepts of software engineering are taken into account. This paper tries to cope with this issue, proposing a software development process to gather the requirement, analyze, design, develop, test and deploy Blockchain applications. The process is based on several Agile practices, such as User Stories and iterative and incremental development based on them. However, it makes also use of more formal notations, such as some UML diagrams describing the design of the system, with additions to represent specific concepts found in Blockchain development. The method is described in good detail, and an example is given to show how it works.
Cryptocurrencies and their foundation technology, the Blockchain, are reshaping finance and economics, allowing a decentralized approach enabling trusted applications with no trusted counterpart. More recently, the Blockchain and the programs running on it, called Smart Contracts, are also finding more and more applications in all fields requiring trust and sound certifications. Some people have come to the point of saying that the "Blockchain revolution" can be compared to that of the Internet and the Web in their early days. As a result, all software development revolving around the Blockcha…
Requirements Engineering (RE) is a key activity in the development of software systems and is concerned with the identification of the goals of stakeholders and their elaboration into precise statements of desired services and behavior. The research describes an Agile Requirements Engineering approach for re-engineering & changes in existing Brownfield adaptive system. The approach has few modifications that can be used as a part of SCRUM development process for re-engineering & changes. The approach illustrates the re-engineering & changes requirements through introduction of GAP analysis & r…
For Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) to become Agile, it is has to be usable with and for DevOps as the technical basis of Agility. We describe our experiences in implementing and applying the BB8 architecture that provides a means to reuse Eclipse-based MDE toolkits within an integrating workflow system. We describe the use of the architecture with in the Gitlab DevOps system and discuss future research fields that emerge as the result of our implementation.
Using models for requirements engineering (RE) is uncommon in systems engineering, despite the widespread use of model-based engineering in general. One reason for this lack of use is that formal models do not match well the trend to move towards agile developing methods. While there exists work that investigates challenges in the adoption of requirements modeling and agile methods in systems engineering, there is a lack of work studying successful approaches of using requirements modelling in agile systems engineering. To address this gap, we conducted a case study investigating the applicati…
Context: Requirements engineering in global scaled agile software development and the planning phase for a multi-vocal literature review. Objective: Develop a protocol to specify the plan which will be followed to conduct a multi-vocal literature review study on requirements engineering in global scaled agile software development. Method: Kitchenham and Charters (2007), and Garousi et al. (2019) guidelines were followed to develop a protocol for multi-vocal literature review. Result: A validated protocol to conduct a multi-vocal literature review. Conclusion: The review protocol consist of fiv…
Integrating security into agile software development is an open issue for research and practice. Especially in strongly regulated industries, complexity increases not only when scaling agile practices but also when aiming for compliance with security standards. To achieve security compliance in a large-scale agile context, we developed S2C-SAFe: An extension of the Scaled Agile Framework that is compliant to the security standard IEC~62443-4-1 for secure product development. In this paper, we present the framework and its evaluation by agile and security experts within Siemens' large-scale pro…
Requirements engineering (RE) is considerably different in agile development than in more traditional development processes. Yet, there is little empirical knowledge on the state of the practice and contemporary problems in agile RE. As part of a bigger survey initiative (Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering), we build an empirical basis on such aspects of agile RE. Based on the responses of representatives from 92 different organisations, we found that agile RE concentrates on free-text documentation of requirements elicited with a variety of techniques. Often, traces between requireme…
Agile requirements engineering implies more complex communication patterns since even the developers are supposed to have direct contact with customers. With more face-to-face communication comes social-psychological factors influencing the requirements. Studies have pointed at the importance of negotiation training, but I argue that more basic human traits can be triggered in favor of the negotiator with the most knowledge of social influence research and practice. I suggest a plan of how research in social influence and requirements facilitation can be conducted, mostly through experimentati…
A Software Engineering project depends significantly on team performance, as does any activity that involves human interaction. In the last years, the traditional perspective on software development is changing and agile methods have received considerable attention. Among other attributes, the ageists claim that fostering creativity is one of the keys to response to common problems and challenges of software development today. The development of new software products requires the generation of novel and useful ideas. It is a conceptual framework introduced in the Agile Manifesto in 2001. This …
[Context & motivation] Driven by the need for faster time-to-market and reduced development lead-time, large-scale systems engineering companies are adopting agile methods in their organizations. This agile transformation is challenging and it is common that adoption starts bottom-up with agile software teams within the context of traditional company structures. [Question/Problem] This creates the challenge of agile teams working within a document-centric and plan-driven (or waterfall) environment. While it may be desirable to take the best of both worlds, it is not clear how that can be achie…
Requirements Engineering (RE) is one of the prime areas in software development. Since agile software development englobes several emerging techniques and advocates for continuous improvement, it urges the question of which agile RE practices are currently most used, their characteristics, and the challenges in their employment. The aim of this work is to investigate and categorize the collection and specification of agile requirements practices based on how professionals perceive their importance for a software project that applies agile methodologies. Thus, a survey was carried out with fort…
[Background] The rapidly changing business environments in which many companies operate is challenging traditional Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches. This gave rise to agile approaches for RE. Security, at the same time, is an essential non-functional requirement that still tends to be difficult to address in agile development contexts. Given the fuzzy notion of "agile" in context of RE and the difficulties of appropriately handling security requirements, the overall understanding of how to handle security requirements in agile RE is still vague. [Objective] Our goal is to characterize …
Agile methods are increasingly introduced in automotive companies in the attempt to become more efficient and flexible in the system development. The adoption of agile practices influences communication between stakeholders, but also makes companies rethink the management of artifacts and documentation like requirements, safety compliance documents, and architecture models. Practitioners aim to reduce irrelevant documentation, but face a lack of guidance to determine what artifacts are needed and how they should be managed. This paper presents artifacts, challenges, guidelines, and practices f…
Teaching agile software development by pairing lectures with hands-on projects has become the norm. This approach poses the problem of grading and evaluating practical project work as well as process conformance during development. Yet, few best practices exist for measuring the success of students in implementing agile practices. Most university courses rely on observations during the course or final oral exams. In this paper, we propose a set of metrics which give insights into the adherence to agile practices in teams. The metrics identify instances in development data, e.g. commits or user…
There is a diversity of models explaining organizational culture and how these complex aspects can be addressed in connection to organizational change efforts. This workshop paper claims that models already exist for dealing with the cultural change that an agile transition is in the software engineering context. Instead of realizing this again through agile success stories, and thus reinventing the wheel, it is argued that the research in the software engineering field should build on these models instead and investigate how/if they differ. Practitioners already work as the change agents desc…
Conducting empirical research in software engineering industry is a process, and as such, it should be generalizable. The aim of this paper is to discuss how academic researchers may address some of the challenges they encounter during conducting empirical research in the software industry by means of a systematic and structured approach. The protocol developed in this paper should serve as a practical guide for researchers and help them with conducting empirical research in this complex environment.
Even if the benefit of implementing Software Product Lines is well established, adopting such a large system is still a complex choice to make: it is hard to implement, needs a good knowledge of market growth and a clear vision of the enterprise objectives for long term. Therefore, many companies remain unwilling to adopt such an approach, unless they gain flexibility and get guarantees. Flexibility can be achieved by adopting an Agile Software Product Line approach, to make sure changes are rapidly implemented and product adapted to market evolution. Guarantees can be acquired by tracing elem…
Innovation and entrepreneurship have a very special role to play in creating sustainable development in the world. Engineering design plays a major role in innovation. These are not new facts. However this added to the fact that in current time knowledge seem to increase at an exponential rate, growing twice every few months. This creates a need to have newer methods to innovate with very little scope to fall short of the expectations from customers. In terms of reliable designing, system design tools and methodologies have been very helpful and have been in use in most engineering industries …
Many tools have been created for measuring the agility of software teams, thus creating a saturation in the field. Three agile measurement tools were selected in order to validate whether they yield sim-ilar results. The surveys of the tools were given to teams in Company A (N = 30). The questions were grouped into agile practices which were checked for correlation in order to establish convergent validity. In addition, we checked whether the questions identified to be the same among the tools would be given the same replies by the respondents. We could not establish convergent validity since …
Systems Engineering (SE) is the set of processes and documentation required for successfully realising large-scale engineering projects, but the classical approach is not a good fit for software-intensive projects, especially when the needs of the different stakeholders are not fully known from the beginning, and requirement priorities might change. The SKA is the ultimate software-enabled telescope, with enormous amounts of computing hardware and software required to perform its data reduction. We give an overview of the system and software engineering processes in the SKA1 development, and t…
The creation of blockchain-based software applications requires today considerable technical knowledge, particularly in software design and programming. This is regarded as a major barrier in adopting this technology in business and making it accessible to a wider audience. As a solution, no-code and low-code approaches have been proposed that require only little or no programming knowledge for creating full-fledged software applications. In this paper we review academic approaches from the discipline of model-driven engineering as well as industrial no-code and low-code development platforms …
The Blockchain technology is reshaping finance, economy, money to the extent that its disruptive power is compared to that of the Internet and the Web in their early days. As a result, all the software development revolving around the Blockchain technology is growing at a staggering rate. In this paper, we acknowledge the need for software engineers to devise specialized tools and techniques for blockchain-oriented software development. From current challenges concerning the definition of new professional roles, demanding testing activities and novel tools for software architecture, we take a …
Blockchain has emerged as one of the most promising and revolutionary technologies in the past years. Companies are exploring implementation of use cases in hope of significant gains in efficiencies. However, to achieve the impact hoped for, it is not sufficient to merely replace existing technologies. The current business processes must also be redesigned and innovated to enable realization of hoped for benefits. This conceptual paper provides a theoretical contribution on how blockchain technology and smart contracts potentially can, within the framework of the seven principles of business p…
The number of machine learning, artificial intelligence or data science related software engineering projects using Agile methodology is increasing. However, there are very few studies on how such projects work in practice. In this paper, we analyze project issues tracking data taken from Scrum (a popular tool for Agile) for several machine learning projects. We compare this data with corresponding data from non-machine learning projects, in an attempt to analyze how machine learning projects are executed differently from normal software engineering projects. On analysis, we find that machine …
Software Engineering is the process of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach that has significant impact on large-scale and complex software development. Scores of well-established software process models have long been adopted in the software development life cycle that pour stakeholders towards the completion of final software product development. Within the boundary of advanced technology, various emerging and futuristic technology is evolving that really need the attention of the software engineering community whether the conventional software process techniques are capable to i…
Editor Introduction: Today software engineering is characterized by two strong trends: agile and distributed. Both together are increasingly demanded and challenge teams and projects due to lack of discipline, insufficient transparency, agile "ping pong" and thus overheads and rework. Authors Fabio Calefato and I describe current technologies and tools for agile collaboration. I look forward to hearing from both readers and prospective column authors about this column and the technologies you want to know more about. -- Christof Ebert
Blockchain has attracted broad interests to build decentralised applications. Blockchain has attracted broad interests to build decentralised applications. However, developing such applications without introducing vulnerabilities is hard for developers, not the least because the deployed code is immutable and can be called by anyone with access to the network. Model-driven engineering (MDE) helps to reduce those risks, by combining proven code snippets as per the model specification, which is easier to understand than source code. Therefore, in this paper, we present an approach for integrated…
Software design is gradually becoming open, distributed, pervasive, and connected. It is a sad statistical fact that software projects are scientifically fragile and tend to fail more than other engineering fields. Agile development is a philosophy. And agile methods are processes that support the agile philosophy. XP places a strong emphasis on technical practices in addition to the more common teamwork and structural practices. In this paper, we elaborate how XP practices can be used to thinking, collaborating, releasing, planning, developing. And the state that make your team and organizati…
Using university capstone courses to teach agile software development methodologies has become commonplace, as agile methods have gained support in professional software development. This usually means students are introduced to and work with the currently most popular agile methodology: Scrum. However, as the agile methods employed in the industry change and are adapted to different contexts, university courses must follow suit. A prime example of this is the Kanban method, which has recently gathered attention in the industry. In this paper, we describe a capstone course design, which adds t…
Agile Software Development (ASD) methodology has become widely used in the industry. Understanding the challenges facing software engineering students is important to designing effective training methods to equip students with proper skills required for effectively using the ASD techniques. Existing empirical research mostly focused on eXtreme Programming (XP) based ASD methodologies. There is a lack of empirical studies about Scrum-based ASD programming which has become the most popular agile methodology among industry practitioners. In this paper, we present empirical findings regarding the …
Agile methods are receiving a growing interest from industry and these approaches are nowadays well accepted and deployed in software engineering. However, some issues remain to introduce agility in systems engineering. The objective of this paper is to show an agile management implementation in an educational project consisting in developing a connected mobile robot, and to evaluate the issues and benefits of adopting an agile approach. Among the most famous agile management methods, SCRUM has been chosen to lead this experiment. This paper first presents the project and how students traditio…
This paper discusses a model-based approach to validate software requirements in agile development processes by simulation and in particular automated testing. The use of models as central development artifact needs to be added to the portfolio of software engineering techniques, to further increase efficiency and flexibility of the development beginning already early in the requirements definition phase. Testing requirements are some of the most important techniques to give feedback and to increase the quality of the result. Therefore testing of artifacts should be introduced as early as poss…
Linting tools automatically identify source code fragments that do not follow a set of predefined standards. Such feedback tools are equally desirable for "linting" agile development processes. However, providing concrete feedback on process conformance is a challenging task, due to the intentional lack of formal agile process models. In this paper, we present ScrumLint, a tool that tackles this issue by analyzing development artifacts. On the basis of experiences with an undergraduate agile software engineering course, we defined a collection of process metrics. These contain the core ideas o…
T-Reqs is a text-based requirements management solution based on the git version control system. It combines useful conventions, templates and helper scripts with powerful existing solutions from the git ecosystem and provides a working solution to address some known requirements engineering challenges in large-scale agile system development. Specifically, it allows agile cross-functional teams to be aware of requirements at system level and enables them to efficiently propose updates to those requirements. Based on our experience with T-Reqs, we i) relate known requirements challenges of larg…
A critical component of any blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform is the consensus algorithm. Blockchain consensus algorithms are the primary vehicle for the nodes within a blockchain network to reach an agreement. In recent years, many blockchain consensus algorithms have been proposed mainly for private and permissioned blockchain networks. However, the performance of these algorithms and their reliability in hostile environments or the presence of byzantine and other network failures are not well understood. In addition, the testing and validation of blockchain applicat…
This paper discusses a model-based approach to software development. It argues that an approach using models as central development artifact needs to be added to the portfolio of software engineering techniques, to further increase efficiency and flexibility of the development as well as quality and reusability of the results. Two major and strongly related techniques are identified and discussed: Test case modeling and an evolutionary approach to model transformation.
Software Engineering Discipline is constantly achieving momentum from past two decades. In last decade, remarkable progress has been observed. New process models that are introduced from time to time in order to keep pace with multidimensional demands of the industry. New software development paradigms are finding its place in industry such as Agile Software Development, Reuse based Development and Component based Development. But different software development models fail to satisfy many needs of software industry. As aim of all the process models is same, i.e., to get quality product, reduce…
Software Repositories contain knowledge on how software engineering teams work, communicate, and collaborate. It can be used to develop a data-informed view of a team's development process, which in turn can be employed for process improvement initiatives. In modern, Agile development methods, process improvement takes place in Retrospective meetings, in which the last development iteration is discussed. However, previously proposed activities that take place in these meetings often do not rely on project data, instead depending solely on the perceptions of team members. We propose new Retrosp…
This article provides a rich discussion on how the sustainability of agile development processes can be enhanced. In particular, we focus on a recently developed framework, named GLUX, that integrates Lean UX into Scrum. GLUX's main goal is to facilitate a seamless integration between agile and user experience (UX) by using gamification to motivate agile teams to adopt a user-centered mindset and carry out UX activities collaboratively throughout the development process. Our role as software researchers is to contribute towards improving software sustainability and provide the software enginee…
Quantum software systems are emerging software engineering (SE) genre that exploit principles of quantum bits (Qubit) and quantum gates (Qgates) to solve complex computing problems that today classic computers can not effectively do in a reasonable time. According to its proponents, agile software development practices have the potential to address many of the problems endemic to the development of quantum software. However, there is a dearth of evidence confirming if agile practices suit and can be adopted by software teams as they are in the context of quantum software development. To addres…
