Context: Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) involves a set of practices that aims at making software development continuous and integrated to business. However, moving from traditional to integrated, agile and data-driven software development requires changes in the organization´s culture, practices and structure, which may not be easy. Objective: Our focus is to help organizations get an overall view of the CSE practices they perform, identify where they are in the CSE evolutionary path and which areas should be improved. Method: We created a diagnosis instrument, called Zeppelin, to evaluate the adoption of CSE practices and applied it in five Brazilian software organizations. Results: Zeppelin was recognized as a useful tool to help organizations have a more comprehensive view of their CSE practices and envision the evolution and improvement path they can follow. Conclusion: Zeppelin supports software development organizations to get a big picture of CSE practices and identify their position in the CSE evolution path. Moreover, it contributes to identify strategies to advance software development towards a CSE environment.

Context Organizations often use different applications to support the Scrum process, including project management tools, source repository and quality assessment tools. These applications store useful data for decision-making. However, data items often remain spread in different applications, each of which adopt different data and behavioral models, posing a barrier for integrated data usage. As a consequence, data-driven decisions in agile development are uncommon, missing valuable opportunities for informed decision making. Objective Considering the need to address semantic issues to properly integrate applications that support the agile development process, we aim to provide a common and comprehensive conceptualization about Scrum in the software development context and apply this conceptualization to support application integration. Method We have developed the Scrum Reference Ontology (SRO) and used it to semantically integrate Azure DevOps and Clockify. Results SRO served as a reference model to build software artifacts in a semantic integration architecture that enables applications to automatically share, exchange and combine data and services. The integrated solution was used in the software development unit of a Brazilian government agency. Results demonstrate that the integrated solution contributed to improving estimates, provided data that helped allocate teams, manage team productivity and project performance, and enabled to identify and fix problems in the Scrum process execution. Conclusions SRO can serve as an interlingua for application integration in the context of Scrum-process support. By capturing the conceptualization underlying Scrum, the reference ontology can address semantic conflicts and thereby support the development of integrated data-driven solutions for decision making.