In the field of Software Engineering (SE), educational institutions are confronted with the demanding responsibility of aligning their curricula to provide students with the competencies — soft and technical — demanded by the evolving job market. Moreover, workplaces are becoming increasingly international, highlighting the competencies required in collaborating with people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Competency models offer essential input for curriculum design. Moreover, educators may need to construct their own competency models when international guidelines fall short. To prepare students for future workplaces, curriculum designers necessitate knowledge to address demands of the international working environment. To gain a deeper understanding of the needs in the international SE context, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify and analyze existing SE competency models and their construction, as well as investigate communication, collaboration, intercultural, and language competencies embedded in these models. This SLR identified 29 competency models across diverse application domains and purposes, constructed using a range of mono- and multi-method approaches, and offering multiple use scenarios for diverse stakeholders. We identified and collected an extensive collection of communication, collaboration, intercultural, and language competencies from the competency models in addition to the elements of the competency model construction process. Regarding identified competencies, communication and collaboration embody as core components in SE competency models whereas intercultural and language competencies are depreciated. Moreover, competency models and their construction lack international aspects. These findings highlight gaps in current competency models and offer insights into curriculum design to better prepare students for international SE environments.

One of the objectives of software engineering education is to make students to learn essential teamwork skills. This is done by having the students work in groups for course assignments. Student team composition plays a vital role in this, as it significantly affects learning outcomes, what is learned, and how. The study presented in this paper aims to better understand the student team composition in software engineering education and investigate the factors affecting it in the international software engineering education context. Those factors should be taken into consideration by software engineering teachers when they design group work assignments in their courses. In this paper, the initial findings of the ongoing Action research study are presented. The results give some identified principles that should be considered when designing student team composition in software engineering courses.

The popularity of continuous integration (CI) is increasing as a result of market pressure to release product features or updates frequently. The ability of CI to deliver quality at speed depends on reliable test automation. In this paper, we present an empirical study to observe the effect of test automation maturity (assessed by standard best practices in the literature) on product quality, test automation effort, and release cycle in the CI context of open source projects. We run our test automation maturity survey and got responses from 37 open source java projects. We also mined software repositories of the same projects. The main results of regression analysis reveal that, higher levels of test automation maturity are positively associated with higher product quality (p-value=0.000624) and shorter release cycle (p-value=0.01891); There is no statistically significant evidence of increased test automation effort due to higher levels of test automation maturity and product quality. Thus, we conclude that, a potential benefit of improving test automation maturity (using standard best practices) is product quality improvement and release cycle acceleration in the CI context of open source projects. We encourage future research to extend our findings by adding more datasets with different programming languages and CI tools, closed source projects, and large-scale industrial projects. Our recommendation to practitioners (in the similar CI context) is to utilize standard best practices to improve test automation maturity.

Abstract Mature test automation is key for achieving software quality at speed. In this paper, we present a multivocal literature review with the objective to survey and synthesize the guidelines given in the literature for improving test automation maturity. We selected and reviewed 81 primary studies, consisting of 26 academic literature and 55 grey literature sources. From primary studies, we extracted 26 test automation best practices (e.g., Define an effective test automation strategy, Set up good test environments, and Develop high‐quality test scripts) and collected many pieces of advice (e.g., in forms of implementation/improvement approaches, technical techniques, concepts, and experience‐based heuristics) on how to conduct these best practices. We made main observations: (1) There are only six best practices whose positive effect on maturity improvement have been evaluated by academic studies using formal empirical methods; (2) several technical related best practices in this MLR were not presented in test maturity models; (3) some best practices can be linked to success factors and maturity impediments proposed by other scholars; (4) most pieces of advice on how to conduct proposed best practices were identified from experience studies and their effectiveness need to be further evaluated with cross‐site empirical evidence using formal empirical methods; (5) in the literature, some advice on how to conduct certain best practices are conflicting, and some advice on how to conduct certain best practices still need further qualitative analysis.

Technological development and increasing personal data collection and utilization raise the importance of understanding individuals’ privacy behavior. Privacy behavior denotes the willingness to disclose personal data for services utilizing these data. The literature presents various privacy behavior models (PBMs). However, the research is incoherent, with inconsistencies among models. Therefore, the application and subsequent development of PBMs are challenging. Different background theories are used for model construction, and studies have been conducted in distinct application domains. We studied whether the models’ inconsistencies could be explained by these differences. Our in-depth analysis of PBMs was based on a systematic literature review of the most often cited key studies. Our findings indicate that the choice of theories and the application domains do not explain inconsistencies; instead, the models are often of an ad hoc type and constructed in an eclectic way. These results imply the need for more consistent research on privacy behavior.

Test automation is important in the software industry but self-assessment instruments for assessing its maturity are not sufficient. The two objectives of this study are to synthesize what an organization should focus to assess its test automation; develop a self-assessment instrument (a survey) for assessing test automation maturity and scientifically evaluate it. We carried out the study in four stages. First, a literature review of 25 sources was conducted. Second, the initial instrument was developed. Third, seven experts from five companies evaluated the initial instrument. Content Validity Index and Cognitive Interview methods were used. Fourth, we revised the developed instrument. Our contributions are as follows: (a) we collected practices mapped into 15 key areas that indicate where an organization should focus to assess its test automation; (b) we developed and evaluated a self-assessment instrument for assessing test automation maturity; (c) we discuss important topics such as response bias that threatens self-assessment instruments. Our results help companies and researchers to understand and improve test automation practices and processes.

Efficient utilisation of new mobility data-based services and promotion of acceptance of data collection from vehicles and people demand an understanding of mobility data privacy concerns, associated with increasing use of tracking technologies, diverse data usages and complex data collection environments. Understanding privacy concerns enables improved service and system development and identification of appropriate data management solutions that contribute to data subjects’ privacy protection, as well as efficient utilisation of the collected data. This study aimed to explore earlier research findings on privacy concerns evaluation and investigate their validity in mobility data collection. Explorative multimethod research was conducted in a mobility service pilot through data controller interviews, user interviews and a user survey. The study's results indicated the need to revise and complement existing privacy concerns evaluation in mobility data collection contexts. The primary findings were as follows: (1) Privacy concerns specific to the mobility data collection context exist. (2) Privacy concerns may change during the service use. (3) Users are not necessarily personally worried about their privacy although they ponder on privacy issues. (4) In contrast to traditional ‘privacy calculus’ thinking, users’ expected benefits from data disclosure may also be driven by altruistic motives.

Abstract Requirements volatility is a major issue in software development, causing problems such as higher defect density, project delays, and cost overruns. Software architecture that guides the overall vision of software product is one of the areas that is greatly affected by requirements volatility. Since critical architecture decisions are made based on the requirements at hand, changes in requirements can result significant changes in architecture. With the wide adoption of agile software development, software architectures are designed to accommodate possible future changes. However, the changes has to be carefully managed as unnecessary and excessive changes can bring negative consequences. An exploratory case study was conducted to study the impact of requirements volatility on software architecture. Fifteen semistructured, thematic interviews were conducted in a European software company. The research revealed poor communication, information distortion, and external dependencies as the main factors that cause requirement volatility and inadequate architecture documentation, inability to trace design rationale, and increased complexity as the main implications of requirements volatility on software architecture. Insights from software teams' awareness of the requirement volatility, factors contribute to it, and possible ways to mitigate its implications will be utilized to improve the management of requirement volatility during software architecting process.

Significant strides are being made in research towards security and privacy concerns associated with connected cars. Being a relatively novel research domain, it is crucial to examine the state of the art to formulate future research strategies. The objective of the paper is to aggregate the research progress made in identifying security and privacy concerns in connected cars, and the concomitant solutions. Using systematic mapping study, we reviewed the state of the art to address the research objective. Results indicate that in the last couple of years, there has been an exponential increase in investigation into this research topic. Compromised vehicular communication has received more attention than any other concern, and the popularity has only increased in recent years. A secure system design and infrastructure is the most common solution for all the identified concerns in this paper, but securing communication is the most popular one. Real-world applicability of the devised solutions is debatable, as most researchers have preferred simulations to empirical evaluation. Overall, insecure system design or infrastructure warrants more attention from solution point of view. In this context, the principles of Prevention by Design and Privacy by Design can be among the most effective strategies.

Software engineering (SE) is a rapidly developing international discipline that requires up-to-date knowledge and skills. The need for well-educated professional software engineers is increasing globally. In China, universities are opening opportunities for collaboration and building cooperative relationships with Western universities in technology fields, including SE, to offer Chinese students possibilities for international education in China instead of studying abroad. Designing high-quality SE education in international collaborative programs faces challenges introduced by cultural factors that affect learning practices. In this study, we addressed these challenges in the context of international collaborative SE education in China. In the first step, we synthesized existing knowledge of Chinese cultural factors affecting learning by conducting a systematic literature review (SLR). In the second step, we conducted interviews with SE students and teachers in a Chinese university that is preparing an international collaborative SE program, in order to see whether the identified cultural factors are valid in the current learning contexts of SE education. The results revealed that many of the identified factors are still valid, but some of them present differently in the current context because of the novelty of the SE discipline and the changing educational environment in China.

Requirements volatility is a major issue in software (SW) development, causing problems such as project delays and cost overruns. Even though there is a considerable amount of research related to requirement volatility, the majority of it is inclined toward project management aspects. The relationship between SW architecture design and requirements volatility has not been researched widely, even though changing requirements may for example lead to higher defect density during testing. An exploratory case study was conducted to study how requirements volatility affects SW architecture design. Fifteen semi-structured, thematic interviews were conducted in the case company, which provides the selection of software products for business customers and consumers. The research revealed the factors, such as requirements uncertainty and dynamic business environment, causing requirements volatility in the case company. The study identified the challenges that requirements volatility posed to SW architecture design, including scheduling and architectural technical debt. In addition, this study discusses means of mitigating the factors that cause requirements volatility and addressing the challenges posed by requirements volatility. SW architects are strongly influenced by requirement volatility. Thus understanding the factors causing requirements volatility as well as means to mitigate the challenges has high industrial relevance.

Abstract Traditional portfolio management tools and methods are challenging for software companies that use agile and lean approaches, because of the complex pre‐planning activities required. In this paper, traditional portfolio management tools and methods that have been conventionally used in industry and presented in literature are reviewed. Findings concerning their use in agile and lean software companies are investigated, on the basis of the literature review and semi‐structured interviews conducted in 7 agile and lean software companies in Finland. The findings indicate that the studied companies do not use traditional portfolio management tools and methods in their entirety. The software companies adapted suitable components from traditional portfolio management tools and methods into their practices. They also apply new tools and methods to manage their portfolios of offerings, to cope with the dynamics required by agile and lean methods. The companies' emphasis is on using tools to facilitate immediate feedback from customers, to assess the value of offerings in their portfolio. The results showed a growing interest in using Kanban at the portfolio level to provide a visual overview of offerings.

Software companies that develop embedded systems following the principles of service-oriented architecture can anticipate various benefits from choreography modelling. Current choreography modelling languages, however, have a limited applicability in embedded systems development since they are not expressive enough to capture all the choreography-relevant aspects that are typical in this domain. We tackled this problem by analysing the needs of embedded systems for choreography modelling language. Our analysis was guided by design science and relied on expert interviews, company-specific documents and the relevant literature. The main results of the analysis presented in this paper are a) design requirements addressing the limitations of choreography modelling languages for embedded systems development and b) proposals for modelling language implementation technologies. The feasibility of these results is evaluated by redesigning an existing choreography modelling language and by implementing a prototype editor for the redesigned language.

In the last decade, Kanban has been promoted as a means for bringing visibility to work while improving the software development flow, team communication and collaboration. However, little empirical evidence exists regarding Kanban use in the software industry. This paper aims to investigate the factors that users perceive to be important for Kanban use. We conducted a survey in 2015 among Kanban practitioners in the LeanKanban LinkedIn community. The survey results consist of 146 responses from 27 different organisations, with all respondents being experienced in using Kanban. The results show that practitioners perceived Kanban as easy to learn and useful in individual and team work. They also consider organisational support and social influence to be important determinants for Kanban use. Respondents noted various perceived benefits for using Kanban, such as bringing visibility to work, helping to reduce work in progress, improving development flow, increasing team communication and facilitating coordination. Despite the benefits, participants also identified challenges to using Kanban, such as organisational support and culture, difficulties in Kanban implementation, lack of training and misunderstanding of key concepts. The paper summarises the results and includes a discussion of implications for effective deployment of Kanban before describing future research needs.

In the last two decades, Agile and Lean approaches have gained wide acceptance in the software industry. In this realm, Kanban emerged in 2004 with a strong practitioner-driven support movement and today, Kanban is increasingly adopted to complement Scrum and other Agile methods. Kanban tends to focus on fast production, rapid and continual user feedback and interaction. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Context: Successfully addressing stakeholder concerns that are related to software system development and operation is crucial to achieving development goals. The importance of using a systematic approach to addressing these concerns throughout the software development life cycle is growing as more and more systems are employed to handle critical tasks. Objective: The goal of this study is to provide an overview of addressing concerns across the software development life cycle. Method: A systematic mapping study was conducted using a pre-defined protocol. Four digital databases were searched for research literature and primary studies were selected after a three round selection process conducted by multiple researchers. Results: The extracted data are processed and the results are reported from different viewpoints. The results are also analyzed against our research goals. Conclusion: We show that there is a considerable variation in the use of terminologies and addressing concerns in different phases of the software development life cycle.

Industry needs graduates from universities having knowledge and skills to tackle the practical issues of real life software development. To facilitate software engineering students and fulfill industry need, the Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu, Finland, built a Software Factory laboratory (SWF) in 2012 based on Lean concept. This study examines factors in the SWF learning environment that affect learning of a SWF course by the students. It employs amended Computer laboratory Environment Inventory (CLEI) and Attitude towards Computers and Computing Courses Questionnaire instrument (ACCC) with two additional constructs: 1) Kanban board 2) Collaborative learning. The general findings indicate that SWF learning environment, collaborative learning and Kanban board play important role in software engineering students learning, academic achievements and professional skills gaining. The findings are helpful to develop a better understanding about learning environments. The information gathered in this study can also be used to improve the software engineering learning environment.

Previous studies suggest that motivation is a critical factor in developer productivity and project outcome, i.e., software project failures are significantly associated with low motivation of software teams. Surveys with software engineers also indicate that culture can affect software development team motivation through differences in developers' motivational factors. In this study, we conduct a survey with 15 Finnish software engineers and 21 non-Finnish software engineers who live in Finland to investigate 1) the relationship between team motivation and project outcome, and 2) the factors that motivate Finnish software engineers. We compare the motivational factors found from the Finnish data with those identified in prior research with developers from four different countries. An analysis of the data from our 36 subjects indicates that project outcome is not associated with team motivation in Finland though this result contradicts prior research. There is a single motivational factor, “team work” that appears to be culturally independent. Unique team motivational factors for Finnish software engineers are found to be “the authority of project manager” and “the vision of project manager”. Our results indicate that cultural differences affect team motivation and that project managers need to consider these when working in a global environment.

Earlier empirical studies have demonstrated the interest that agile methods have generated in the software industry. Currently, lean approaches are increasingly adopted for complementing agile methods in software processes. With the goal of providing up-to-day results that can be used by organizations implementing or planning to implement agile and/or lean methods, we have conducted a study on the current stage of agile and lean adoption and usage in the software industry. For this purpose, we conducted an extensive survey among Finnish software practitioners in 2011, using the membership registry of The Finnish Information Processing Association (FIPA) as a sampling frame. 408 responses were collected from 200 software intensive organizations in the study. The survey included questions for identifying the rate of agile and lean usage in software organizations as well as the implementation of specific methods and practices, goals in adopting agile and lean, reasons for not applying these methods and effects of the agile and lean usage. The results of the survey reveal that a majority of respondents' organizational units are using agile and/or lean methods (58%). Furthermore, lean appears as a new player, being used by 24% of respondents, mainly in combination with agile (21%). The reasons and benefits for using agile and lean methods appeared to correspond in most parts to the findings of the earlier research. Generally, the experiences of using agile and lean methods seem to be rather positive, although challenges, such as obtaining management support and limitations for scaling agile in distributed settings, were also identified.

Business value analysis (BVA) quantifies the factors that provide value and cost to an organization. It aims at capturing value, controlling risks, and capitalizing on opportunities. GQM+Strategies is an approach designed to aid in the definition and alignment of business goals, strategies, and an integrated measurement program at all levels in the organization. In this paper we describe how to perform business value analysis (BVA) using the GQM+Strategies approach. The integration of these two approaches provides a coupling of cost-benefit and risk analysis (value goals) with operationally measurable business goals and supports the evaluation of business goal success and the effectiveness of the chosen strategies. An application of the combined approach is provided to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed method. It deals with the business goal of modernizing the product for the evolving market.

In the global software development environment, the companies face the challenges of collaboration. This is particularly challenging for software companies in rural areas, which are typically small companies with limited resources. Often their customers and partners are also geographically dispersed. These factors, in addition to geographical distances, highlight the challenges of communication and collaboration. The focus of this research is to find out how to support geographically dispersed/distributed projects. We addressed this problem by identifying the key categories of collaboration challenges from the literature and conducting an empirical study on companies of the area. The study consists of 30 interviews with 13 companies sited mostly in Finnish rural area, Kainuu region. The company interviews revealed that, instead of the project management purposes, communication tools are needed to provide an infrastructure for collaborative sessions, to interact with colleagues and customers. Limited resources also add the challenges of the communication tools and processes implementation.

Abstract The focus of the paper is to reveal the relationships between software maintainability and other internal software quality attributes. The source code characteristics of five Java‐based open‐source software products are analyzed using the software measurement tool SoftCalc. The relationships between maintainability and internal quality attributes are identified based on the Pearson product moment correlation analysis. Our results show negative correlations between maintainability and some well‐known internal software quality attributes, as well as the ones between maintainability and complexity metrics. Particularly, according to our results, the Number of Data Variables Declared and the Decisional Complexity McClure Metric have the strongest correlations with maintainability. The results of our study, that is to say, knowledge about the relationships between internal software quality attributes and maintainability, can be used as a basis for improvement of software maintainability at earlier stages of the software development process. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The paper focuses on measuring and assessing the relation of adaptive maintenance process and quality of open source software (OSS). A framework for assessing adaptive maintenance process is proposed and applied. The framework consists of six sub- processes. Five OSSs with considerable number of releases have been studied empirically. Their main evolutionary and quality characteristics have been measured. The main results of the study are the following:. 1) Software maintainability is affected mostly by the activities of the 'analysis' maintenance sub-process. 2) Software testability is affected by the activities of all maintenance sub-processes. 3) Software reliability is affected mostly by the activities of the 'design' and 'delivery' maintenance sub- processes. 4) Software complexity is affected mostly by the activities of the 'problem identification', design', 'implementation' and 'test' sub-processes. 5) Software flexibility is affected mostly by the activities of the 'delivery' sub-process.

Purpose To report the work on the design of an integrated identity verification system architecture aimed at approaching high verification accuracy, continuous security, and user‐friendliness. Design/methodology/approach The reported research corresponds to the building process in the design science research paradigm. The requirements to an identity verification system are defined and used in the selection of architecture components. Furthermore, various issues affecting the suitability of component distribution between a terminal and a remote server are considered. Findings In order to meet the stated requirements, in the proposed architecture static and dynamic identity verification is combined. The use of the dynamic part enables continuous and user‐friendly verification, while the static part is responsible for accurate verification. A suitable distribution of architecture components between the terminal and the remote server is proposed. Research limitations/implications The proposed architecture represents a specification that corresponds to the computational viewpoint of the reference model for open distributed processing. Other specifications, such as engineering or technological specifications, which are needed for successful implementation of the system, are not provided in the paper. Practical implications The paper provides a specification of the integrated identify verification system architecture that can be utilised during further design and subsequent implementation of the system. Originality/value While available approaches to identity verification in a mobile environment concentrate mainly on connectivity identity verification (employed in accessing communication services), the proposed architecture focuses on application‐level identity verification needed to access application‐level resources, remotely or locally on the terminal.