In the realm of industrial software development, DevOps has emerged as the preferred approach for handling the highly iterative software production process. DevOps refers to the tight integration of development and operations activities, with Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) being pivotal methodologies for ensuring the iterative delivery of high-quality software. To achieve CI/CD, pipelines of activities are deployed using commercial tools. Due to the dynamic nature of these tools, CI/CD pipelines are often migrated to new versions or even new tools. Since this is mostly a manual process, it is a cumbersome and error-prone activity. To assist software engineers during this process, we propose a novel approach that leverages model-driven engineering (MDE) to support the migration of CI/CD pipelines. Our approach is inspired by the traditional reengineering horseshoe model, which abstracts existing pipeline artifacts into a comprehensive model as an intermediate representation. From these models, we can then generate semantic-equivalent pipelines for any novel CI/CD tool. Thus, our main contribution comprises a metamodel designed to represent the structure of existing CI/CD pipelines and build the foundation for MDE-based migration of CI/CD pipelines. We validated our metamodel by successfully modeling 400 existing pipelines. This evaluation demonstrated a 100% applicability rate when applied to configuration files from technologies that collectively account for over 92% of CI/CD scripts in use. Furthermore, we conducted a detailed case study demonstrating the practical applicability of our approach in real-world migration scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate that our metamodel promotes equivalence between an original pipeline and a new one generated from it in a different technology by showing through test cases that the execution traces of both pipelines are identical.

Together with many success stories, promises such as the increase in production speed and the improvement in stakeholders’ collaboration have contributed to making agile a transformation in the software industry in which many companies want to take part. However, driven either by a natural and expected evolution or by contextual factors that challenge the adoption of agile methods as prescribed by their creator(s), software processes in practice mutate into hybrids over time. Are these still agile? In this article, we investigate the question: what makes a software development method agile? We present an empirical study grounded in a large-scale international survey that aims to identify software development methods and practices that improve or tame agility. Based on 556 data points, we analyze the perceived degree of agility in the implementation of standard project disciplines and its relation to used development methods and practices. Our findings suggest that only a small number of participants operate their projects in a purely traditional or agile manner (under 15 percent). That said, most project disciplines and most practices show a clear trend towards increasing degrees of agility. Compared to the methods used to develop software, the selection of practices has a stronger effect on the degree of agility of a given discipline. Finally, there are no methods or practices that explicitly guarantee or prevent agility. We conclude that agility cannot be defined solely at the process level. Additional factors need to be taken into account when trying to implement or improve agility in a software company. Finally, we discuss the field of software process-related research in the light of our findings and present a roadmap for future research.

Abstract Modern user interfaces (UIs) are increasingly expected to be plastic, in the sense that they retain a constant level of usability, even when subjected to context changes at runtime. Self-adaptive user interfaces (SAUIs) have been promoted as a solution for context variability due to their ability to automatically adapt to the context-of-use at runtime. The development of SAUIs is a challenging and complex task as additional aspects like context management and UI adaptation have to be covered. In classical model-driven UI development approaches, these aspects are not fully integrated and hence introduce additional complexity as they represent crosscutting concerns. In this paper, we present an integrated model-driven development approach where a classical model-driven development of UIs is coupled with a model-driven development of context-of-use and UI adaptation rules. We base our approach on the core UI modeling language IFML and introduce new modeling languages for context-of-use (ContextML) and UI adaptation rules (AdaptML). The generated UI code, based on the IFML model, is coupled with the context and adaptation services, generated from the ContextML and AdaptML model, respectively. The integration of the generated artifacts, namely UI code, context, and adaptation services in an overall rule-based execution environment, enables runtime UI adaptation. The benefit of our approach is demonstrated by two case studies, showing the development of SAUIs for different application scenarios and a usability study which has been conducted to analyze end-user satisfaction of SAUIs.

Migration of test cases has a twofold benefit in software migration projects: reuse of valuable knowledge as well as time and cost savings. The diversity of software migration project contexts require a flexible and modular construction method to address several aspects like different system and test environments or the impact of the system changes on the test cases. When an inappropriate migration method is used, it may increase the effort and the costs and also decrease the overall software quality. Therefore, a critical task in test case migration is to provide a transformation method which fits the context. To address this problem, in this paper, we present a framework that enables a modular construction of context-specific migration methods for test cases by assembling predefined building blocks. Our approach builds upon an existing framework for modular construction of software transformation methods and consists of a method base and a method engineering process. Method fragments are the atomic building blocks of a migration method, whereas method patterns encode specific migration strategies. The guidance on development and enactment of migration methods is provided by the method engineering process. We evaluate our approach in an industrial case study where a part of the Eclipse Modeling Framework was migrated from Java to C#.

Modern User Interfaces (UIs) are increasingly expected to be plastic, in the sense that they retain a constant level of usability, even when subjected to context (platform, user, and environment) changes at runtime. Adaptive UIs have been promoted as a solution for context variability due to their ability to automatically adapt to the context-of-use at runtime. However, evaluating end-user satisfaction of adaptive UIs is a challenging task, because the UI and the context-of-use are both constantly changing. Thus, an acceptance analysis of UI adaptation features should consider the context-of-use when adaptations are triggered. Classical usability evaluation methods like usability tests mostly focus on a posteriori analysis techniques and do not fully exploit the potential of collecting implicit and explicit user feedback at runtime. To address this challenge, we present an on-the-fly usability testing solution that combines continuous context monitoring together with collection of instant user feedback to assess end-user satisfaction of UI adaptation features. The solution was applied to a mobile Android mail application, which served as basis for a usability study with 23 participants. A data-driven end-user satisfaction analysis based on the collected context information and user feedback was conducted. The main results show that most of the triggered UI adaptation features were positively rated.

Spreadsheets are used in professional business contexts to make decisions based on collected data. Usually, these spreadsheets are developed by end users in an ad-hoc way. Thus, the business logic of a concrete spreadsheet is not explicit to end users, making its correctness hard to assess and users have to trust. We present an approach where structure and computational behavior of a spreadsheet are specified by a model with a process-like notation based on pre-defined functional spreadsheet services with typed interfaces. This enables a consistent construction process of a spreadsheet that comprises defining its structure and computational behavior as well as filling it with data and executing the defined computational behavior. Thus, concrete spreadsheets are equipped with a specification of their construction process. This supports their understanding and correct usage, even in case of legacy spreadsheets. The approach has been developed in cooperation with an industrial partner.

To be successful with global software development (GSD), development knowledge needs to be shared among the developers and stakeholders, and the quality of the exchanged information must be assured. Therefore, mature processes, methods and tools have to be in place. If a unified and integrated solution does not exist, this impedes the exchange of knowledge (and the migration of people between projects). In GSD, such a diversity can lead to new problems: offshore development teams have to repeatedly re-adjust to method variants used by the respective business units. This can lead to misinterpretation of information and risks for project success. We report on re-aligning the varying software engineering methods and unifying the methodology throughout Capgemini sd&m. We also standardized quality assurance procedures and tightly integrated them with the engineering methodology. By this, we arrived at a comprehensive company-wide Enterprise Software Engineering Model that effectively supports knowledge transfer from clients to the onshore and offshore team.

Model Driven Development (MDD) is an important para-digm in Software Engineering. In MDD, applications are specified systematically using abstract, platform independent models. The models are then transformed into executable code for different platforms and target devices. Model-driven techniques become ever more prominent in any kind of application, such as multimedia and Web, ubiquitous and automotive applications.

In acceptance testing, customer requirements as specified in system specifications have to be tested for their successful implementation. This is a time-consuming task due to inherent system complexity and thus a large number of requirements. In order to reduce efforts in acceptance testing, we introduce a novel approach that exploits redundancies and implicit relations in requirements specifications, which are based on multi-viewpoint techniques, in our case the reference model for open distributed processing (RM-ODP). It deploys requirements clustering and linguistic analysis techniques for reducing the total number of test cases. We report on concrete experiences with this approach within joint R&D work of the Software Quality Lab (s-lab) of the University of Paderborn and HJP Consulting, an international consulting company, specialized in planning, procurement and acceptance testing of national electronic identification (e-ID) systems. The paper is concluded with an overview on the current tool support especially for automated detection of the redundancies and implicit relations in requirements. Also the future work on the tool support for the overall test specification process is discussed.

The Visual Contract Workbench is a tool that supports model-driven development of software systems by lifting the Design by Contract idea, which is usually used at the code level, to the model level. It uses visual contracts for graphically specifying the pre- and post-conditions of an operation. Java classes with JML (Java modeling language) assertions are generated from visual contracts to facilitate automatic monitoring of the correctness of the programmers' implementation

Design by contract (DbC) is widely acknowledged to be a powerful technique for creating reliable software. DbC allows developers to specify the behavior of an operation precisely by pre- and post-conditions. Existing DbC approaches predominantly use textual representations of contracts to annotate the actual program code with assertions. In the unified modeling language (UML), the textual object constraint language (OCL) supports the specification of preand post-conditions by constraining the model elements that occur in UML diagrams. However, textual specifications in OCL can become complex and cumbersome, especially for software developers who are typically not used to OCL. In this paper, we propose to specify the pre-and post-conditions of an operation visually by a pair of UML object diagrams (visual contract). We define a mapping of visual contracts into Java classes that are annotated with behavioral interface specifications in the Java modeling language (JML). The mapping supports testing the correctness of the implementation against the specification using JML tools, which include a runtime assertion checker. Thus we make the visual contracts executable.