Agile methods are associated with values, principles, and practices that influence organisational climate. Organisational climate is the meaning employees attach to the policies, practices, and procedures they experience and the behaviours they observe getting rewarded, supported, and expected. A negative climate can influence team members on aspects such as motivation, ability to make good decisions, and willingness to innovate. Conversely, a positive climate can influence project success and the competitiveness of organisations. The authors investigate how organisations considered assessing the organisational climate of Agile teams, and which are the benefits and the difficulties associated with this assessment . They conducted a qualitative study on five Brazilian organisations. They interviewed key personnel involved with organisational climate assessments. They identified 16 benefits and nine difficulties of organisational climate assessments. Based on the results and the literature, they formulated two propositions representing pitfalls that can hinder organisational climate assessments of Agile teams. Organisations should use instruments adapted to the Agile culture to improve the ability to diagnose the organisational climate and involve the Agile team in the climate management activities to ease the identification of the team's perception about project performance and product quality indicators.

Requirements communication is essential in software development projects since customer needs must be communicated to the development team clearly and effectively. Although the use case (UC) specifications are used to communicate requirements in detail, developers do not always follow them. This study presents an empirical study carried out to understand the reasons why developers do not follow UC specifications and their difficulties using UC specifications in generating prototypes. Results show that the four reasons why developers fail to follow UC specifications are the existence of specification errors, ambiguous information, lack of detailed specification, or incomplete information, and due to improvement suggestions. Also, the specification defects types that impacted prototypes creation the most were an omission, ambiguity, and incorrect fact. The authors noted that 6 out of 25 (24%) defects in the UC specifications caused discrepancies in prototypes, 12 (48%) were corrected during the prototypes creation, and 7 (28%) were not propagated to the prototypes.

Background: Aligning IT to business goals is a top priority for CIOs. However, managers in the IT Service Industry face difficulties to define and monitor IT service goals and strategies aligned to business goals. Goal: We carried out a study to investigate how IT service managers define, measure and monitor IT service goals and strategies, and the difficulties they have faced in this context. Method: We interviewed five IT service managers from four service provider organizations and used coding procedures to analyze the collected data. Results: We obtained information about how organizations define, measure and evaluate IT service goals and strategies and, from the difficulties reported by the managers, we identified 19 pitfalls. Conclusions: By analyzing the relations among the pitfalls, we defined five hypotheses: (i) lack of awareness and transparency on the relationship between strategies and goals may harm the achievement of IT service goals and strategies, (ii) lack of proper support to execute measurement inhibits reevaluation and adjustment of strategies and indicators related to IT service goals, (iii) lack of motivation can jeopardize decision-making by IT service managers, (iv) conflicts between strategies may harm IT service goals achievement, and (v) lack of proper support to execute IT service management initiatives may harm IT service goals achievement.

Measurement is a crucial practice for software organizations to monitor projects and improve processes. It defines indicators and provides information to support decision-making. Defining indicators is not a trivial task. Although the literature proposes several indicators, there is not a consensus about how to specify them. This paper presents ASM.br (Assistance for Software Measurement based on relationships), a template for specifying indicators by using a one-page form in which textual and graphical information is recorded and the relationships between indicators and between them and goals are put explicitly. By using ASM.br, indicators are recorded in a standardized way, easing understanding and reuse. ASM.br was applied in a software organization and the results suggests its feasibility and utility.

GQM+Strategies is a goal-oriented measurement approach that supports organizations in identifying goals, strategies to achieve goals, and measures to monitor strategies and goals. However, identifying proper strategies is not an easy task. This paper presents two studies performed to investigate how strategies can be established to achieve IT service goals. First, we carried out a qualitative study involving three IT service-related departments of a large company to find out how they have been defining strategies and problems faced. We noted that strategies were defined by leaders, in a top-down approach, or by teams, in a bottom-up approach, and causal analysis techniques have been used to investigate aspects which can impact goals achievement. We also found the relation between the IT service strategies and goals was not clear for the teams. Considering these findings, we performed an empirical study in another IT-service related department applying an approach combining GQM+Strategies plus some instruments (checklists, templates and examples) and causal analysis to support IT strategies identification. As a result, we noticed that by using that approach the team was able to derive IT strategies based on goals, define measures to monitor goals and strategies, and better understand the alignment between the goals to be achieved and the strategies to be performed. Moreover, results showed that causal analysis is useful to define strategies and that supporting instruments facilitate using the approach and building GQM+Strategies grid.

Background: Businesses are increasingly dependent on IT services, and providers need to deliver fast, with high quality and low cost.An incident is an event that can lead to loss or disruption of services.Incident management reinstates normal service operation as quickly as possible and mitigates negative impact to business, ensuring agreed levels of service quality.So, reduce resolution time is usually the most important goal for incidents.Aims We aim to obtain knowledge about process and identify adequate metrics for Incident Management to help reduction of resolution time.Our research questions are: (i) Which Incident Management sub-process is causing more impact to resolution time?(ii) Which metrics can be used to measure this sub-process?(iii) What actions can be taken to improve Incident Management process in order to reduce impact of this subprocess in resolution time?Method: We present a case study in a global large company that considers reduction of incidents resolution time as a goal.Results: By applying BPM, BPI and Process Mining we were able to discover the underlined process and a bottleneck for resolution time.Moreover, we proposed metrics to improve process and service quality by applying GQM+Strategies.

Software process performance analysis is a challenge for software organizations that aim to achieve higher levels of maturity models and quality standards, as it usually depends on knowledge of quantitative and statistical techniques, and experience with software processes and in the organizational context. This paper presents a knowledge-based environment proposed for supporting software organizations during the execution of process performance analysis. This environment aims to provide a body of knowledge and a set of activities and tasks for software process performance, which will be executed based on rules that guide the user during the execution of this analysis. The initial body of knowledge of this environment was collected and the set of activities and tasks was identified. The environment tools and their communication are also shown in this paper.

Background: Understanding how to successfully deal with human and technical aspects involved in Software Process Improvement (SPI) programs is a challenging issue. Technical aspects are not enough to guarantee the success of activities. Human factors (e.g., experiences, opinions and perceptions) impact the effectiveness of SPI programs. Aim: this paper aims to improve our current understanding on how human aspects can influence SPI programs from the point of view of the professionals involved in such efforts. We compare our findings with the results of previous studies in order to analyze the different contexts in which human aspects influence SPI. Method: We conducted a qualitative study in the context of small companies involved in SPI programs in Amazonas State in Brazil based on the Brazilian Maturity Model - MPS.BR. We used semi-structural interviews with software engineers. Results: We identified findings about eleven of the fourteen investigated human aspects. We identified new characteristics that motivate actors to get involved in SPI programs. Finally, while previous research indicated that the process of individual decision making as a negative aspect, we identified this as a positive aspect. Conclusions: Despite the differences in companies' size and maturity models, our findings corroborate many of the important results of previous case studies. The consistency of the presented results with previous research in different organizations, teams, and countries suggest that these results are true for software engineering in general. However, there were differences related to the motivating factors and the perception of the individual decision making. In our study, we observed that the personality, perception and employee selection aspects were also significant to the SPI program's success. This has not been re

Customer satisfaction, quality improvement and rework reduction are known to be the most important benefits obtained through deployment of software process maturity models and standards within an organization. Since 2003 BL Informatica has been motivated and has established and maintained its software processes based on international standards (like ISO 9001:2000) and maturity models (like MPS.BR and CMMI). In spite of the lack of financial and human resources, the organization achieved satisfactory results. This paper describes BL Infomatica's software processes improvement plan, lessons learned, difficulties and benefits that where collected during the execution of the improvement plan. It also presents quantitative results that demonstrate the return on investment during these years.

The rapid deployment of high quality commercial technology often results in organizational reengineering. These changes reflect in different software engineering aspects, as the increase of software complexity. Within heterogeneous environments, due to the variety of users classes and their geographical distribution, a common understanding of the domain knowledge can be a hard task and would lead to a high uncertainty of the knowledge of real needs. User centered design methods along with knowledge engineering techniques proved to be suitable in such cases. This paper describes an evolutionary proposal for requirements engineering of a system to support the management of telecommunication networks. The proposal enhanced and speeded the software development, achieving a better acceptance of the system since the software group managed to efficiently acquire the organizational knowledge.