Together with many success stories, promises such as the increase in production speed and the improvement in stakeholders’ collaboration have contributed to making agile a transformation in the software industry in which many companies want to take part. However, driven either by a natural and expected evolution or by contextual factors that challenge the adoption of agile methods as prescribed by their creator(s), software processes in practice mutate into hybrids over time. Are these still agile? In this article, we investigate the question: what makes a software development method agile? We present an empirical study grounded in a large-scale international survey that aims to identify software development methods and practices that improve or tame agility. Based on 556 data points, we analyze the perceived degree of agility in the implementation of standard project disciplines and its relation to used development methods and practices. Our findings suggest that only a small number of participants operate their projects in a purely traditional or agile manner (under 15 percent). That said, most project disciplines and most practices show a clear trend towards increasing degrees of agility. Compared to the methods used to develop software, the selection of practices has a stronger effect on the degree of agility of a given discipline. Finally, there are no methods or practices that explicitly guarantee or prevent agility. We conclude that agility cannot be defined solely at the process level. Additional factors need to be taken into account when trying to implement or improve agility in a software company. Finally, we discuss the field of software process-related research in the light of our findings and present a roadmap for future research.

Software and system development faces numerous challenges of rapidly changing markets. To address such challenges, companies and projects design and adopt specific development approaches by combining well-structured comprehensive methods and flexible agile practices. Yet, the number of methods and practices is large, and available studies argue that the actual process composition is carried out in a fairly ad-hoc manner. The present paper reports on a survey on hybrid software development approaches. We study which approaches are used in practice, how different approaches are combined, and what contextual factors influence the use and combination of hybrid software development approaches. Our results from 69 study participants show a variety of development approaches used and combined in practice. We show that most combinations follow a pattern in which a traditional process model serves as framework in which several fine-grained (agile) practices are plugged in. We further show that hybrid software development approaches are independent from the company size and external triggers. We conclude that such approaches are the results of a natural process evolution, which is mainly driven by experience, learning, and pragmatism.

Processes constrain developer freedom and impact software development cost. They can increase costs from only a few cents to almost 1000 USD per line of code. But they can also benefit the maintainability, dependability and safety of critical software. If failure risk costs are high, then the application of more expensive processes can actually reduce costs. Therefore it is important to understand which processes to apply when. This paper investigates development in four domains from aerospace to research, in order to extract some of the hidden expert knowledge expressed through the usage of processes. It analyzes data from a survey in a biotope of unregulated projects and three standards with respect to how process cost and benefit are balanced through criticality tailoring of processes. The results add to our understanding of criticality tailoring and the domains' engineering cultures, provide hints for what to address in process improvements, and can help to gauge if a standard might need adjustment.

Abstract The DLR Space Administration designs and implements the German space program. While project management rests with the agency, suppliers are contracted for building the space devices and their software. As opposed to many other domains, these are often unique devices with uncommon and custom‐built peripherals. Its software is specifically developed for a single mission only and controls critical functionality. A small coding error can mean the loss of a mission. For this reason, customer and supplier collaborate to improve products and processes to achieve better software at the end of a project. We discuss quality in the context of space projects, and report a cross‐sectional view from a customer's perspective on various management tools for influencing suppliers' processes and product quality: standards, single‐source tailoring and cross‐company product assurance. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The DLR Space Administration designs and implements the German space program. While project management rests with the agency, suppliers are contracted for building the space devices and their software. As opposed to many other domains, these are often unique devices with uncommon and custom-built peripherals. Its software is specifically developed for a single mission only and controls critical functionality. A small coding error can mean the loss of a mission. For this reason, customer and supplier closely collaborate on the field of software quality. We report from a customer's perspective on lessons and management tools for influencing suppliers' processes and product quality: standards, single-source tailoring and cross-company product assurance.

Software is a knowledge intensive product, which can only evolve if there is effective and efficient information exchange between developers. Complying to coding conventions improves information exchange by improving the readability of source code. However, without some form of enforcement, compliance to coding conventions is limited. We look at the problem of information exchange in code and propose gamification as a way to motivate developers to invest in compliance. Our concept consists of a technical prototype and its integration into a Scrum environment. By means of two experiments with agile software teams and subsequent surveys, we show that gamification can effectively improve adherence to coding conventions.

There is a problem with documentation and architectural design in agile projects. This is the result of interviews we have conducted with 37 software engineering experts from industry and academia. In our paper, we analyze the interview results and the origins of the revealed issues. We propose ways to integrate software design methodologies into agile development, and reputation mechanism to solve documentation problems. The contributions of this paper are (i) an investigation of expert opinions on design and documentation problems, (ii) an analysis of problem origins, and (iii) proposals for future improvements of agile processes.

This paper proposes a PhD research that deals with improving internal documentation in software projects. Software developers often do not like to create documentation because it has few value to the individual himself. Yet the purpose of internal documentation is to help others understand the software and the problem it addresses. Documentation increases development speed, reduces software maintenance costs, helps to keep development on track, and mitigates the negative effects of distance in distributed settings. This research aims to increase the individuals' motivation to write documentation by means of reputation. The CollabReview prototype is a web-based reputation system that analyzes artifacts of internal documentation to derive personal reputation scores. Developers making many good contributions will achieve higher reputation scores. These scores can then be employed to softly influence developer behavior, e.g. by incentivizing them to contribute to documentation with social rewards. No strict rule enforcement is necessary.

The EU subsidizes research projects in the ICT area with hundreds of millions of Euros per year with the aim of strengthening Europe's global competitiveness. A key requirement of EU projects is the involvement of partners from at least three different countries. This leads to highly distributed software environments where company, country, and culture boundaries run in the midst of tasks like requirements engineering, architectural design, implementation or testing. We present results from an empirical study involving more than 50 transnational, multi-million Euro projects of the Sixth Framework Programme. The results show which tools are accepted by developers and used in practice in the respective phases of the software process. Finally, we shape the idea of Research Software Engineering.

The HYDRA project develops middleware for networked embedded systems that allows developers to create ambient intelligence applications based on wireless devices and sensors. Through its unique combination of Service-oriented Architecture (SoA) and a semantic-based Model Driven Architecture, HYDRA will enable the development of generic services based on open standards. A smart home application is built that facilitates intelligent communication of heterogeneous embedded devices through an overlay P2P network. We interconnect common devices available in private households and integrate wireless power metering plugs to gain access to energy consumption data. These data are used for monitoring and analyzing consumed energy on device level in near real-time.

Within the MACE project, we support simple access to and retrieval of digital learning resources in exploratory architectural education. In order to facilitate the improved access, we introduce a digital representation of real world objects through an extension of the LOM based MACE application profile, named entity recognition and the combination of various databases. Automatically grouping learning resources, we add additional metadata otherwise not available and thus improve retrieval of suitable learning resources. Our first results clearly indicate the suitability of our approach.

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Source code metadata on a file-level granularity is too coarse for certain applications. But fine-grained metadata (e.g. line-by-line authorship) easily gets lost due to changes like merging, moving or copying code. Enabling metadata to survive code evolution provides valuable insights into program source code. This helps developers to understand the sources and opens up opportunities for advanced tools. We present a concept that utilizes different search heuristics to identify probable ancestors of source documents, and pair this with clone detection to locate origins of inserted code. Arbitrary kinds of metadata can then be linked to code sections and be preserved automatically while code evolves. We evaluate our approach using code from the Hydra and FreeCol projects, and sketch prospective applications.

Today's software development is becoming more and more international. With involved stakeholders being distributed over several remote locations in the world, particularly the management of software requirements becomes complex and difficult to handle. In this paper, we report on a Web-based computer-aided requirements elicitation process that decreases the number of necessary face-to-face meetings and reduces communication overhead. It is thus possible to distribute requirements elicitation efforts to partners or contractors that may be situated anywhere in the world.