Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, 9th International Conference, PROFES 2008, Monte Porzio Catone, Italy, June 23-25, 2008, Proceedings (2025)

An Industrial Experince in Improving the Software Process through Domain Analysis

An Experince Report on Decoding, Monitoring, and Controlling the Software Process

Product-Focused Software Process Improvement

Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Modeling the Experimental Software Engineering Process

Systematic reviews on software engineering literature have shown an insufficient experimental validation of claims, when compared to the standard practice in other well established sciences. Poor validation of software engineering claims increases the risks of introducing changes in the software process of an organization, as the potential benefits assessment is based on hype, rather than on facts. The software engineering community lacks widely disseminated experimental best practices. This paper contributes with a model of the experimental software engineering process that captures the best practices in the area and is aligned with recent proposals for experimental data dissemination. This process model can be used either as a support in the definition of software engineering experiments or in conducting comparisons among experiment results.

A Process Modelling Approach for Design of Experiments Software

IFAC Proceedings Volumes, 2006

System analysis of processes and process chains is a crucial step in the framework of Design of Experiments (DoE). Software for Design of Experiments mostly features the set up, the analysis and the evaluation of experiments but not the system analysis step. For this a process modeling approach for DoE is presented and the benefits of integrating this approach in Software-Packages for DoE are pointed out.

Special section: Controlled Experiments in Software Engineering

Information and Software Technology, 2001

Process-Based Software Engineering

A recent trend in software engineering is the shift from a focus on laboratory-oriented software engineering to a more industry-oriented view of software engineering processes. This complements preceding ideas about software engineering in terms of organization and process-orientation. From the domain coverage point of view, many of the existing software engineering approaches have mainly concentrated on the technical aspects of software development. Important areas of software engineering, such as the technical and organizational infrastructures, have been left untouched. As software systems increase in scales, issues of complexity and professional practices become involved. Software development as an academic or laboratory activity, has to engage with software development as a key industrialized process.

CBR for Experimental Software Engineering

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998

Objective of our work is to exploit the mutual interrelations between case-based reasoning (CBR) and experimental software engineering (ESE) for the sake of both fields. In particular, we address the following topics:

An empirical methodology for introducing software processes

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 2001

There is a growing interest in empirical study in software engineering, both for validating mature technologies and for guiding improvements of less-mature technologies. This paper introduces an empirical methodology, based on experiences garnered over more than two decades of work by the Empirical Software Engineering Group at the University of Maryland and related organizations, for taking a newly proposed improvement to development processes from the conceptual phase through transfer to industry. The methodology presents a series of questions that should be addressed, as well as the types of studies that best address those questions. The methodology is illustrated by a specific research program on inspection processes for Object-Oriented designs. Specific examples of the studies that were performed and how the methodology impacted the development of the inspection process are also described.

Software Engineering Research

Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications, 2014

The classical scientific method has been settled through the last centuries as a cyclic, iterative process of observation, hypothesis formulation, and confirmation/refutation of hypothesis through experimentation. This "experimental scientific method" was mainly developed in the context of natural sciences dealing with the physical world, such as Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Electromagnetism, Chemistry and so on. But when we try to apply this classical view of the scientific method to the various branches of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, among which Software Engineering, we find two kinds of obstacles. First, Computer Science is rooted both in formal sciences such as Mathematics and experimental sciences such as Physics, therefore an excessive emphasis on the experimental side is not appropriate to give a full account of this kind of scientific activity. Second, the production of software systems has to deal not only with the behavior of complex physical systems such as computers, but also with the behavior of complex human systems (developers interacting with stakeholders, for instance, or users interacting with machines) where educational, cultural, sociological and economical factors are essential. Therefore, empirical methods in their narrow sense, even though valuable in some respects, are rather limited to understand a reality that exceeds the mere physical world. Moreover, neither formal nor empirical methods can provide a full account of scientific activity, which relies on something that is beyond any established method. Qualitative (i.e. meta-methodical) reasoning plays the directive role in scientific activity. In this chapter we claim that acknowledging a plurality of research methods in software engineering will benefit the advancement of this branch of science.