It’s a fact of life that organizations love to reorganize. Reorganizations have a profound effect on the way product lines are governed. We introduce the concept of the Responsibility, Authority, and Accountability (RAA) network. An RAA network assists in the governance process of product lines for internal information systems, even in the face of massive reorganization. Armour (“Reorg Cycle” [1]) describes the pressures of reorganization to balance the “dimensions of organization” (e.g., geography, customers, product technology); we apply polarity management to balance the dimensions. Armour describes the difficulty of applying hierarchical organization charts—“single dimension management structures”—to the above “multidimensional environments”; we apply lean RAA networks to span organization charts and provide the multidimensional view needed for product lines. Armour observes that network organization approaches “do not have a good track record”; our experience is that lean, resilient RAA networks document the product line’s governance architecture. These governance architecture patterns are applied repeatedly to the strata of products in the product line. We present the governance architect’s RAA to define, monitor, and sustain governance health using these tools: polarity maps, polarity networks, RAA maps, and RAA networks.

Software Product Lines

While previously available methodologies for software like those published in the early days of object technology claimed to be appropriate for every conceivable project, situational method engineering (SME) acknowledges that most projects typically have individual characteristics and situations. Thus, finding the most effective methodology for a particular project needs specific tailoring to that situation. Such a tailored software development methodology needs to take into account all the bits and pieces needed for an organization to develop software, including the software process, the input and output work products, the people involved, the languages used to describe requirements, design, code, and eventually also measures of success or failure. The authors have structured the book into three parts. Part I deals with all the basic concepts, terminology and overall ideas underpinning situational method engineering. As a summary of this part, they present a formal meta-model that enables readers to create their own quality methods and supporting tools. In Part II, they explain how to implement SME in practice, i.e., how to find method components and put them together and how to evaluate the resulting method. For illustration, they also include several industry case studies of customized or constructed processes, highlighting the impact that high-quality engineered methods can have on the success of an industrial software development. Finally, Part III summarizes some of the more recent and forward-looking ideas. This book presents the first summary of the state of the art for SME. For academics, it provides a comprehensive conceptual framework and discusses new research areas. For lecturers, thanks to its step-by-step explanations from basics to the customization and quality assessment of constructed methods, it serves as a solid basis for comprehensive courses on the topic. For industry methodologists, it offers a reference guide on features and technologies to consider when developing in-house software development methods or customising and adopting off-the-shelf ones.

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Situational Method Engineering

For years, agile methods are considered the most promising route toward successful software development, and a considerable number of published studies the successful use of agile methods and reports on the benefits companies have from adopting agile methods. Yet, since the world is not black or white, the question for what happened to the traditional models arises. Are traditional models replaced by agile methods? How is the transformation toward Agile managed, and, moreover, where did it start? With this paper we close a gap in literature by studying the general process use over time to investigate how traditional and agile methods are used. Is there coexistence or do agile methods accelerate the traditional processes' extinction? The findings of our literature study comprise two major results: First, studies and reliable numbers on the general process model use are rare, i.e., we lack quantitative data on the actual process use and, thus, we often lack the ability to ground process-related research in practically relevant issues. Second, despite the assumed dominance of agile methods, our results clearly show that companies enact context-specific hybrid solutions in which traditional and agile development approaches are used in combination.

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Is Water-Scrum-Fall Reality? On the Use of Agile and Traditional Development Practices

Chatbots have been around for years and have been used in many areas such as medicine or commerce. Our focus is on the development and current uses of chatbots in the field of education, where they can function as service assistants or as educational agents. In this research paper, we attempt to make a systematic review of the literature on educational chatbots that address various issues. From 485 sources, 80 studies on chatbots and their application in education were selected through a step‐by‐step procedure based on the guidelines of the PRISMA framework, using a set of predefined criteria. The results obtained demonstrate the existence of different types of educational chatbots currently in use that affect student learning or improve services in various areas. This paper also examines the type of technology used to unravel the learning outcome that can be obtained from each type of chatbots. Finally, our results identify instances where a chatbot can assist in learning under conditions similar to those of a human tutor, while exploring other possibilities and techniques for assessing the quality of chatbots. Our analysis details these findings and can provide a solid framework for research and development of chatbots for the educational field.

Rediscovering the use of chatbots in education: A systematic literature review

Context: The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAISs) such as workow management systems, enterprise resource planning systems, or case management systems, together with the high variability in business processes (e.g., sales processes may vary depending on the respective products and countries), has resulted in large industrial process model repositories. To cope with this business process variability, the proper management of process variants along the entire process lifecycle becomes crucial. Objective: The goal of this paper is to develop a fundamental understanding of business process variability. In particular, the paper will provide a framework for assessing and comparing process variability approaches and the support they provide for the dierent phases of the business process life

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VIVACE: A Framework for the Systematic Evaluation of Variability Support in Process-Aware Information Systems

Variability in software process models justifies tailoring them to meet the specific goals and characteristics of organisations and projects. Existing process modelling notations typically do not have constructs which are appropriate for expressing process variability. To fill this gap, the authors have extended software process engineering metamodel (SPEM) to vSPEM, by adding new variability constructs (such as variants and variation points). This article presents an empirical validation to check whether the variability constructs supported through vSPEM are more appropriate for modelling variant-rich processes than SPEM, in terms of understandability of the notation, as well as of their variability mechanisms. The results indicate that the vSPEM variability mechanisms understandability is a 126.99% higher than for SPEM. On the other hand, process diagram understandability is a 34.87% lower with vSPEM than with SPEM. If we compare the relative results obtained with regard to understandability of diagrams and understandability of variation mechanisms of both vSPEM and SPEM, the enhancement just mentioned is 3.64 times that fall. The results indicate accepting that a slight decrease in understandability of the diagrams might lead to a large increase in understandability when using variability mechanisms of vSPEM.

Modelling software process variability: an empirical study

Organizations developing software-based systems or services often need to tailor process reference models--including product-oriented and project-oriented processes--to meet both their own characteristics and those of their projects. Existing process reference models, however, are often defined in a generic manner. They typically offer only limited mechanisms for adapting processes to the needs of organizational units, project goals, and project environments. This article presents a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed conference and journal articles published between 1990 and 2009. Our aim was both to identify requirements for process-tailoring notation and to analyze those tailoring mechanisms that are currently in existence and that consistently support process tailoring. The results show that the software engineering community has demonstrated an ever-increasing interest in software process tailoring, ranging from the consideration of theoretical proposals regarding how to tailor processes to the scrutiny of practical experiences in organizations. Existing tailoring mechanisms principally permit the modeling of variations of activities, artifacts, or roles by insertion or deletion. Two types of variations have been proposed: the individual modification of process elements and the simultaneous variation of several process elements. Resolving tailoring primarily refers to selecting or deselecting optional elements or to choosing between alternatives. It is sometimes guided by explicitly defined processes and supported by tools or mechanisms from the field of knowledge engineering. The study results show that tailoring notations are not as mature as the industry requires if they are to provide the kind of support for process tailoring that fulfills the requirements identified, i.e., including security policies for the whole process, or carrying out one activity rather than another. A notation must therefore be built, which takes these requirements into consideration in order to permit variant-rich processes representation and use this variability to consistently support process tailoring.

Requirements and constructors for tailoring software processes: a systematic literature review

Software organizations need to adapt their processes to each new project. Although Software Process Lines are the most suitable approach for the design of processes which are adapted to different contexts, SPEM does not include the appropriate mechanisms for modelling them. The objective of this paper is to suggest a SPEM extension which will support the variability implied in a Software Process Line. New variability mechanisms based on the use of Variation Points and Variants, by means of which the variability necessary in a Process Line is represented, have been proposed. The new mechanisms that we shall introduce into SPEM, will allow it to model Software Process Lines. From these lines, the generation of processes adapted to each context will simplify the selection of the appropriate variants for each variation point.

Towards a SPEM v2.0 Extension to Define Process Lines Variability Mechanisms

Global Software Development (GSD) is set to be the paradigm that will support software industries in the increasingly globalized 21st century. It opens the door to companies from emerging countries to compete for their own gap in the market. It does, however, still bring some challenges with it. It must integrate different cultures, work styles, and work timetables in the same development process. In fact, GSD methodologies do indeed include specific activities to coordinate different work teams, but they fail precisely where any other methodology does: in the need to be truly useful by meeting the distinct cultural requirements of every organization involved, all at the same time. Up to now, process tailoring has been managed through variability mechanisms. Since these successfully merge original structure with cultural assets, they are also useful for adjusting global methodologies so that they suit each particular development context. This paper presents a case study of the use of the Variant-Rich Process paradigm (VRP) to support tailoring in a GSD methodology. It reveals the suitability of the VRP mechanisms, given that they support the two tailoring dimensions a GSD project involves, i.e., they take into account the circumstances of the entire global project, as well as the need to fit the internal characteristics of each organization; furthermore, they save effort in the tailoring process.

Process variability management in global software development: a case study

Software process models need to be variant-rich, in the sense that they should be systematically customizable to specific project goals and project environments. It is currently very difficult to model Variant-Rich Process (VRP) because variability mechanisms are largely missing in modern process modeling languages. Variability mechanisms from other domains, such as programming languages, might be suitable for the representation of variability and could be adapted to the modeling of software processes. Mechanisms from Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) and concepts from Aspect-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) show particular promise when modeling variability. This paper presents an approach that integrates variability concepts from SPLE and AOSE in the design of a VRP approach for the systematic support of tailoring in software processes. This approach has also been implemented in SPEM, resulting in the vSPEM notation. It has been used in a pilot application, which indicates that our approach based on AOSE can make process tailoring easier and more productive.

Tomás Martínez-Ruiz

Papers

Modelling software process variability: an empirical study

Requirements and constructors for tailoring software processes: a systematic literature review

Towards a SPEM v2.0 Extension to Define Process Lines Variability Mechanisms

Process variability management in global software development: a case study

Applying AOSE Concepts to Model Crosscutting Variability in Variant-Rich Processes