In project-based software engineering courses, the collaboration among participants is usually the cornerstone that makes these experiences successful and allows reaching the courses’ instructional goals. Prescribing a collaboration process for these courses is not appropriate, since their workflows are ad hoc framed; i.e., most of their activities are defined on-the-fly by the participants, according to their current context and needs. Therefore, only coordination and awareness mechanisms can be defined at the course design time, in order to support and promote collaboration among participants during these courses. This article presents a qualitative study that identifies and relates these coordination and awareness mechanisms, and embeds them in a set of software ceremonies. Course instructors and instructional designers can take advantage of these results, not only to identify design decision points, but also coordination and awareness mechanisms to promote collaboration in this type of courses.

Hybrid software processes are defined as a combination of practices from traditional and agile methodologies. Most software development companies currently apply this kind of process; however, the appropriate combination of practices is not often clear. To address this issue, we have proposed DynaTail in a previous study, i.e., a method for tailoring a software process and its practices to a particular context to improve a certain characteristic. In this work, we use an MDE approach to formalize all the artifacts involved in DynaTail: processes, context, practices influencing goals, and tailoring transformations. This model-based formalization lays the base for building supporting tools. We illustrate all models with a running example from a Chilean medium-size software development company.

Companies formalize software processes as a way of organizing development projects. Since there are differences in project contexts, a one-size-fits-all approach does not work well in practice. Some companies use a family of a predefined processes, but this approach has a high process maintenance cost. Instead, we define Software Process Lines (SPrL), where a general process with variability is tailored to project contexts. Model- Driven Engineering (MDE) provides a formal framework for defining the models and transformations required for automated SPrL tailoring. However, this approach requires the definition and co-evolution of various types of models and tool support beyond the skills of process engineers, making the industrial adoption challenging. This paper shares our experience using a megamodeling approach to the development of the back-end of our toolset. The megamodel provides a uniform mechanism for process definition, variability, tailoring and evolution, and we hide the MDE complexity through a user-friendly front-end. We report the application of our approach at Mobius, a small Chilean software enterprise.

Companies formalize their software processes as a way of organizing their development projects. As each project has its own requirements and objectives, a family of processes is required in practice, in order to ensure that each project is handled appropriately. This family may be a collection of predefined processes, but can also be automatically generated by tailoring a general process to a project’s context which requires formalization and tool support to be successful. Model-driven engineering provides a formal framework for defining the models and transformations required for automated process tailoring, but various types of models must be specified and evolved, limiting the industrial adoption of this approach. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a megamodel for automated process tailoring. Megamodeling provides an integrating framework for modeling in the large, including the definition and evolution of all models and transformations required for tailoring while hiding complexity. We report the application of our approach to the software development process of Rhiscom, a small Chilean company.

Tailoring is the mechanism of adapting a software process to the needs of a project. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) provides a formal basis and tools infrastructure for automatic software process tailoring. However, the use of a MDE approach can become awkward for most process engineers, because it requires knowledge of MDE concepts and formalisms to implement the required models and tailoring transformations. Proposals trying to address this problem should balance the formality required by MDE and the usability needed by the users. This paper presents a model-based tool and its associated procedure that allow process engineers to automatically generate tailoring transformation rules using a graphical user-interface, obtaining the desired balance. The proposal is illustrated with a running example.

The software industry has recognized the importance of teamwork as a driver for good projects results. However teamwork is not an easy goal to reach, because there is a large list of variables affecting the process. Each project probably will require a particular recipe to promote and perform real teamwork. Therefore a one-size fits-all approach does not work to promote teamwork in the software development scenarios. This article presents an influence model that helps the development teams to find a strategy that allow them to carry out teamwork. This model is the result of an analysis conducted by the authors on 27 software projects performed in a controlled setting in an academic environment.