DevOps responds to the growing need of companies to streamline the software development process and thus has experienced widespread adoption in the past few years. However, the successful adoption of DevOps requires companies to address important cultural and organizational changes. Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognize that various DevOps taxonomies exist, both from academic and practitioner perspectives, which may lead to misleading or failed adoption of DevOps. This paper presents empirical research on the structure of DevOps teams in software-producing organizations. The goal is to better understand the organizational structure and characteristics of teams adopting DevOps by harmonizing the existing knowledge. To achieve this, we employed a grounded theory approach with collaborative coding, involving two research groups. Inter-Coder Agreement (ICA) was utilized to guide the discussion rounds. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of existing studies on DevOps teams and taxonomies to gain a deeper understanding of the subject. From the analysis, we built a substantive and analytic theory of DevOps taxonomies. The theory is substantive in that the scope of validity refers to the ten secondary studies processed and analytic in that it analyzes “what is” rather than explaining causality or attempting predictive generalizations. A public repository with all the data related to the products resulting from the analysis and generation of the theory is available. We built a theory on DevOps taxonomies and tested whether it harmonizes the existing taxonomies, i.e., whether our theory can instantiate the others. This is the first step to define which taxonomies are best suited to approach DevOps culture and practices according to the companies’ objectives and capabilities. Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board.

The qualitative research on empirical software engineering that uses Grounded Theory is increasing (GT). The trustworthiness, rigor, and transparency of GT qualitative data analysis can benefit, among others, when multiple analysts juxtapose diverse perspectives and collaborate to develop a common code frame based on a consensual and consistent interpretation. Inter-Rater Reliability (IRR) and/or Inter-Rater Agreement (IRA) are commonly used techniques to measure consensus, and thus develop a shared interpretation. However, minimal guidance is available about how and when to measure IRR/IRA during the iterative process of GT, so researchers have been using ad hoc methods for years. This paper presents a process for systematically measuring IRR/IRA in GT studies, when appropriate, which is grounded in a previous systematic mapping study on collaborative GT in the field of software engineering. Meta-science guided us to analyze the issues and challenges of collaborative GT and formalize a process to measure IRR/IRA in GT. This process guides researchers to incrementally generate a theory while ensuring consensus on the constructs that support it, improving trustworthiness, rigor, and transparency, and promoting the communicability, reflexivity, and replicability of the research. The application of this process to a GT study seems to support its feasibility. In the absence of further confirmation, this would represent the first step in a de facto standard to be applied to those GT studies that may benefit from IRR/IRA techniques.

The research on empirical software engineering that uses qualitative data analysis is increasing. However, most of them do not deepen into the validity of the findings, specifically in the reliability of coding in which these methodologies rely on. This paper aims to establish a novel theoretical framework that enables a methodological approach for conducting this validity analysis through Inter-Coder Agreement (ICA), based on the use of coefficients to measure the degree of agreement in collaborative coding. We systematically review several existing variants of Krippendorff’s α coefficients and provide a novel common mathematical framework to unify them. Finally, this paper illustrates the use of this theoretical framework in a large case study on DevOps culture. We expect that this work will help researchers who are committed to measuring consensus with quantitative techniques in collaborative coding, conducted as part of a qualitative research, to improve the rigor of their findings.

Context: DevOps can be defined as a cultural movement to improve and accelerate the delivery of business value by making the collaboration between development and operations effective.Objective: This paper aims to help practitioners and researchers to better understand the organizational structure and characteristics of teams adopting DevOps.Method: We conducted an exploratory study by leveraging in-depth, semi-structured interviews with relevant stakeholders of 31 multinational software-intensive companies, together with industrial workshops and observations at organizations’ facilities that supported triangulation. We used Grounded Theory as qualitative research method to explore the structure and characteristics of teams, and statistical analysis to discover their implications in software delivery performance.Results: We describe a taxonomy of team structures that shows emerging, stable and consolidated product teams that are classified according to six variables, such as collaboration frequency, product ownership sharing, and autonomy, among others, as well as their implications on software delivery performance. These teams are often supported by horizontal teams (DevOps platform teams, Centers of Excellence, and chapters) that provide them with platform technical capabilities, mentoring and evangelization, and even temporarily may facilitate human resources.Conclusion: This study aims to strengthen evidence and support practitioners in making better informed about organizational team structures by analyzing their main characteristics and implications in software delivery performance.

DevOps is becoming a main competency required by the software industry. However, academic institutions have been slow to provide DevOps training in software engineering (SE) curricula. One reason for this is the fact that the problems addressed by DevOps may be hard to understand to students who have not previously worked in the industry or on projects of meaningful size and complexity. This paper shows an experience that integrates DevOps in SE curricula through research-based teaching (RBT). We aim to expose students to the problems that have led companies to adopt DevOps by researching and analyzing real cases of companies, thereby placing students at the center of learning. The contribution of this work is to innovate the application of RBT in software engineering by showing that the RBT approach is, at least, as good as the traditional approach and that it also leads to some extra benefits. This innovative solution has been implemented by using (i) qualitative analysis, specifically coding techniques, to discover knowledge and (ii) inter-coder agreement (ICA), specifically Krippendorff’s$\alpha$coefficients, to measure the extent of students’ learning. These techniques allow teachers to determine whether students’ learning in the subject is homogeneous and to analyze disagreements among students during their analysis. This approach provides teachers with new tools (Krippendorff’s$\alpha$coefficients) to identify those concepts that are less understood by students and to evaluate whether improvements in the research instruments (e.g., the codebook used in the qualitative analysis) also generate improvements in the students’ agreement. This RBT experience shows evidence that can be used to assess whether a similar experience and the use of ICA could be applied in similar learning contexts with similar research contexts.

Current Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems are highly distributed systems, which integrate cloud, fog, and edge computing approaches. Accelerating their maintenance and continuous improvement, while ensuring their availability, is complex. DevOps promotes fast and continuous feedback from operations to development to detect problems before customers are impacted, among other benefits. However, there is not any formal definition of how to do this. This article defines the “fast and continuous monitoring feedback of system availability” activity (F&CF availability) that supports automatic and continuous monitoring feedback from operations to the development of the IoT system availability. This activity has been formalized through the software and systems process engineering metamodel (SPEM). Its implementation is demonstrated in a real scenario that provides evidence that the formalization of the F&CF availability activity helps teams in better diagnosing and fixing outage problems. The result is a distributed and configurable monitoring component developed through code [monitoring as code (MaC)]. This component is embedded in the IoT infrastructure. MaC enables DevOps team to configure their own metrics and indicators at runtime, i.e., monitoring on demand. The formalization of this activity, based on an MaC technique, enables the automation, versioning, and replication of monitoring elements.

The present work is focused on studying two issues: the “teamwork” generic competence and the “academic motivation”. Currently the professional profile of engineers has a strong component of teamwork. On the other hand, motivational profile of students determines their tendencies when they come to work in team, as well as their performance at work. In this context we suggest four hypotheses: (H1) students improve their teamwork capacity by specific training and carrying out a set of activities integrated into an active learning process; (H2) students with higher mastery motivation have better attitude towards team working; (H3) students with higher mastery motivation obtain better results in academic performance; and (H4) students show different motivation profiles in different circumstances: type of courses, teaching methodologies, different times of the learning process. This study was carried out with computer science engineering students from two Spanish universities. The first results point to an improvement in teamwork competence of students if they have previously received specific training in facets of that competence. Other results indicate that there is a correlation between the motivational profiles of students and their perception about teamwork competence. Finally, and contrary to the initial hypothesis, these profiles appear to not influence significantly the academic performance of students.

The use of Project Based Learning has spread widely over the last decades, not only throughout countries but also among disciplines. One of the most significant characteristics of this methodology is the use of ill-structured problems as central activity during the course, which represents an important difficulty for both teachers and students. This work presents a model, supported by a tool, focused on helping teachers and students in Project Based Learning, overcoming these difficulties. Firstly, teachers are guided in designing the project following the main principles of this methodology. Once the project has been specified at the desired level of depth, the same tool helps students to finish the project specification and organize the implementation. Collaborative work among different users is allowed in both phases. This tool has been satisfactorily tested designing two real projects used in Computer Engineering and Software Engineering degrees.

The assessment of learning outcomes is a key concept in the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) since credits are awarded when the assessment shows the competences which were aimed at have been developed at an appropriate level. This paper describes a study which was first part of the project of the Bologna Experts Team-Spain and then developed as an independent study. It was carried out with the overall goal to gain experience in the assessment of learning outcomes. More specifically it aimed at 1) designing procedures for the assessment of learning outcomes related to these compulsory generic competences; 2) testing some basic psychometric features that an assessment device with some consequences for the subjects being evaluated needs to prove; 3) testing different procedures of standard setting, and 4) using assessment results as orienting feedback to students and their tutors. The process of development of tests to carry out the assessment of learning outcomes related to these competences, as well as some basic features regarding their reliability and validity is described and first results on the comparison of results achieved at two academic levels, will also be described at a later stage.

The assessment of learning outcomes is a key concept in the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) since credits are awarded when the assessment shows the competences which were aimed at have been developed at an appropriate level. This paper describes a study which was first part of the Bologna Experts Team-Spain project and then developed as an independent study. It was carried out with the overall goal to gain experience in the assessment of learning outcomes. More specifically it aimed at 1) designing procedures for the assessment of learning outcomes related to these compulsory generic competences; 2) testing some basic psychometric features that an assessment device with some consequences for the subjects being evaluated needs to prove; 3) testing different procedures of standard setting, and 4) using assessment results as orienting feedback to students and their tutors. The process of development of tests to carry out the assessment of learning outcomes is described as well as some basic features regarding their reliability and validity. First conclusions on the comparison of the results achieved at two academic levels are also presented.

Carrier aggregation is one of the new features of LTE-Advanced in order to provide higher user throughputs. Scheduling algorithms must guarantee backward compatibility with Release 8 users, so that they must be assigned to certain a Component Carrier (CC). This paper formulates this assignment as a Transportation Problem (TP) where the costs of shipping from a supply point to a demand point are oppositely related to the spectral efficiency. The benefits of this algorithm for inter-band spectrum aggregation are shown here. Its performance has been analyzed for aggregation of CCs at frequency bands with very different propagation characteristics, i.e. 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz, which are current candidates for LTE-A deployments in Europe. Simulation results show that this algorithm can provide up to 50% gains over a random scheduler for low user densities and large cell radii, which makes it especially appropriate for rural environments. On the other hand, the fairness, cell capacity and gain on cell-edge user throughput increase as the number of LTE-Advanced users increases.

In this paper, we describe the use of cooperative learning (with jigsaw) in lab sessions in an operating systems course.

To our knowledge, no current software development methodology explicitly describes how to transit between the different development stages it proposes. This is more evident in the transition from the analysis stage to the software architecture of the application. This paper presents the first semiautomatic method to derive the software architecture of a system from its analysis. The proposal is a set of heuristics that, when applied to the analysis artifacts, generate the software architecture of the application. This proposal has several benefits: (1) the software architecture of the system is directly derived by applying the heuristics; (2) there is a direct trace relationship between the analysis artifacts and the elements of the resulting architecture, which eases the system maintenance.

Nowadays both industry and academic environments are showing a lot of interest in the Software Engineering discipline. Therefore, it is a challenge for universities to provide students with appropriate training in this area, preparing them for their future professional practice. There are many difficulties to provide that training. The outstanding ones are: the Software Engineering area is too broad and class hours are scarce, the discipline requires a high level of abstraction; it is difficult to reproduce real world situations in the classroom to provide a practical learning environment; the number of students per professor is very high (at least in Spain); companies develop software with a maturity level rarely over level 2 of the CMM for Software (again, at least in Spain) as opposed to what is taught at the University. Besides, there are different levels and study plans, making more difficult to structure the contents to teach in each term and degree. In this paper we present a plan for teaching Software Engineering trying to overcome some of the difficulties above.