Software Development Waste (SDW) is defined as any resource-consuming activity that does not add value to the client or the organization developing the software. SDW impacts the overall efficiency and productivity of a software project as the scale and size of the project grows. Although engineering leaders usually put in effort to minimize waste, the lack of definitive measures to track and manage SDW is a cause of concern. To address this gap, we propose five measures, namely Stale Forks, Project Diversification Index, PR Rejection Rate, Backlog Inversion Index, and Feature Fulfillment Rate to potentially identify unused artifacts, building the wrong feature/product, mismanagement of backlog types of SDW. We apply these measures on ten open-source projects and share our observations to apply them in practice for managing SDW.

Software practitioners use various methods in Requirements Engineering (RE) to elicit, analyze, and specify the requirements of enterprise products. The methods impact the final product characteristics and influence product delivery. Ad-hoc usage of the methods by software practitioners can lead to inconsistency and ambiguity in the product. With the notable rise in enterprise products, games, and so forth across various domains, Virtual Reality (VR) has become an essential technology for the future. The methods adopted for RE for developing VR products requires a detailed study. This article presents a mapping study on RE methods prescribed and used for developing VR applications including requirements elicitation, requirements analysis, and requirements specification. Our study provides insights into the use of such methods in the VR community and suggests using specific RE methods in various fields of interest. We also discuss future directions in RE for VR products.

Research in hardware and software support for Virtual Reality (VR) has significantly increased over the last decade. Given the software platform fragmentation and hardware volatility, there is an apparent disconnect among practitioners while building applications in the VR domain. This paper proposes a role-based model template as a meta-model to specify the bare minimum VR software system. We conducted a grounded-theory-based qualitative study on prevailing and phased-out VR SDKs and standards to propose this meta-model. This model template can help VR practitioners build open-source tools to develop, design, and test VR software systems.

Identifying dependency between various artifacts in a large scale software system is a non-trivial task.As the software evolves, multiple artifacts like files, docs, classes, database scripts, etc., are likely to undergo change concurrently.Such artifacts tend to have a dependency between them, otherwise referred to as logical coupling.Researchers have used Support and Confidence as an association rule based measurement to predict the levels of logical coupling among the software artifacts.However, employing a single change on a software artifact can span across various closely related changes when many code contributors are working on the same change.Thus it is important to preprocess and group these semantically related change-sets before identifying logical coupling.In this paper, we propose a method to identify logical coupling and group semantically related change sets.We evaluate our method on real-world git repositories and document our observations.

The increasing usage of smart-phones has resulted in mobile applications replacing or supplementing traditional web-based applications. Given the limitations of the form factor in smartphones, usability can be considered as one of the important attributes that determine the success of a mobile application. The measures available for assessing the usability of mobile applications tend to focus more on human aspects and less on the functional aspects of usability. As part of this paper, we propose a usability evaluation framework to identify functional usability issues specific to mobile applications. This framework uses usability guidelines and code analysis to improve the usability of a mobile application. As a proof of concept, we have built an end-to-end system using the framework to validate and verify usability issues in Android mobile applications. We also generate code recommendations to implement failed usability guidelines.

Integrated software products are complex in design. They are prone to defects caused by integrated and non-integrated modules of the entire integrated software suite. In such software products, a small proportion of defects are fixed as soon as they are reported. Rest of the defects are targeted for fixes in future product release cycles. Among such targeted defects, most of them seem to be insignificant and innocuous in the current version but have the potential to become acute in future versions. In this paper, we propose an approach to study defect dependency of the reported defect using a dependency metric. Identifying the dependency of a defect in an integrated product suite can help the product stake-owners to prioritize them and help improve software quality.