Value Based Software Engineering Research Papers (original) (raw)

We consider a set of programs a family when it pays to look at their common aspects before looking at their differences. For commercial software developers the implications are twofold: First, making rational decisions about product-line processes and products requires the ability to answer the question: "Does it pay?" Second, whether or not something pays is ultimately a business (rather than software engineering) question. In short, making sound software engineering decisions requires understanding the business implications of those decisions, and vice versa. This paper describes work in progress to develop a product-line process model and common value metric that adequately link product value drivers (what it pays) with the software engineering decisions that affect those drivers. In it, we describe a systematic approach to quantifying the return on investment for both product and process improvements based on common software engineering principles and a common value me...

- by Stefan Biffl
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- Software Development, Value Based Software Engineering, Project manager, Case Study

Context: To remain competitive, innovative and to grow, companies must change from cost-based decision-making to value-based decision-making where the decisions taken maximize software value and support company's overall value creation. Objective: The objective of this paper is to complement and expand an existing classification of value aspects within the context of product management and development with additional aspects relating to value within the context of project management and development. Method: In this study, we present the results from a snowballing literature review that focuses on software value in software project management. In the research for relevance literature we focus on software value aspects different than cost as cost is widely used in project management literature to estimate value. Results: We have identified nine primary studies in two snowball iterations. From these studies, we derived three categories of value aspects: financial, risk analysis and process improvement based on value identification.

In software development, the waterfall model is commonly used, especially for large-scale software systems. For smaller-scale software development, agile software development approaches such as extreme programming or scrum are used. Traditional software development methodologies are mainly targeted toward customer-centric development, and therefore, new software methodologies are often not well received in the industry. In this study, we propose a new software development methodology that is aimed at developing innovative software using artificial intelligence (AI), idea creation, value engineering, and systems design. The name of our method is named as EPISODE (Extreme Programming method for Innovative SOftware based on systems DEsign). EPISODE supports the efficient and creative development of open source software (OSS) by small groups. Moreover we describe an evaluation of EPISODE in a class.

In this study, we investigate the state of the literature and practice about Value-Based Requirements Engineering. We focus on identifying what models for VBRE were presented and what challenges were discussed. We triangulate our results with industrial practitioners by conducting an industrial survey with 59 respondents. We identified 26 primary and 3 secondary studies and synthesized the findings using content analysis. VBRE was identified to be having a positive impact among survey practitioners. However, challenges like aligning product, project and organization opinions, selecting a most valuable requirement for a particular release, and including time-dependent requirements were identified to be impacting the organizations. The results from the study also suggest that, value dimensions like stakeholder value and customer value were not so frequently discussed in RE processes in both literature and among our industry respondents.

Agile software development methodologies driving cycle-time reduction have been shown to improve efficiency, enable shorter lead times and place a stronger focus on customer needs. They are also moving the process development focus from cost-reduction towards value creation. Optimizing software development based on lean and agile principles requires tools and metrics to optimize against. We need a new set of metrics that measure the process up to the point of customer use and feedback. With these we can drive cycle time reduction and improve value focus. Recently the lean startup methodology has been promoting a similar approach within the startup context. In this paper, we develop and validate a cycle-time-based metric framework in the context of the software feature development process and provide the basis for fast feedback from customers. We report results on applying three metrics from the framework to improve the cycle-time of the development of features for a SaaS service.

- by Matti Saarikallio and +1
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- Lean Software Development, Cycle time reduction, Value Based Software Engineering, Software Business

Risk analysis is traditionally accepted as a complex and critical activity in various contexts, such as strategic planning and software development. Given its complexity, several modeling approaches have been proposed to help analysts in representing and analyzing risks. Naturally , having a clear understanding of the nature of risk is fundamental for such an activity. Yet, risk is still a heavily overloaded and conceptually unclear notion, despite the wide number of efforts to properly characterize it, including a series of international standards. In this paper, we address this issue by means of an in-depth ontological analysis of the notion of risk. In particular, this analysis shows a surprising and important result, namely, that the notion of risk is irreducibly intertwined with the notion of value and, more specifically, that risk assessment is a particular case of value ascription. As a result, we propose a concrete artifact, namely, the Common Ontology of Value and Risk, which we employ to harmonize different conceptions of risk existing in the literature.

- by Giancarlo Guizzardi and +1
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- Information Systems, Software Engineering, Information Science, Information Systems (Business Informatics)
- by Stefan Biffl
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- Value Based Software Engineering, Programming, Automation, Case Study

This paper presents research results that describe how value generation can be improved in the design process of industrial projects when using computer advanced visualization tools CAVT. The CAVT concept definition, prior studies about impacts of CAVT, and why they are not sufficient are presented in the paper, supporting the assertion that the extensive attention to technology instead of to the context of technology application and the lack of a conceptual framework has prevented some prior research about CAVT impacts to truly focus in ideas about how to improve engineering and construction processes. Combining production theory and lean construction principles with information technology IT, a framework for understanding the impacts of CAVT developed as part of the research is proposed. Illustration of the use of the framework in a case study and research validation activities leads to analytic generalization of the research results.

- by Leonardo Rischmoller and +1
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- Management, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Science

Value Based Software Engineering (VBSE) deals with the development of economic driven software systems. In such systems, a business idea is implemented in order to gain the market leverage. For the realization of an idea, the requirements must be highly valuable. The valuable requirements can only be obtained from a key set of valuable stakeholders. Researchers presented different stakeholder identification and quantification (SIQ) approaches. The current approaches do not provide low level details in order to carry out the SIQ process, and most of these approaches deal at a very high level of abstraction. This paper focuses on the problems of existing SIQ process and identifies the key stakeholder attributes in order to streamline the SIQ process. In this research, a survey is conducted in the software industry of Pakistan and Malaysia. The survey reports the problems faced by the software industry in the SIQ process. Moreover, the key stakeholder attributes are also reported which may be used to solve the key problems of the SIQ process.

... M. Ramzan, M. Arfan Jaffar M. Amjad Iqbal, Sajid Anwar, Arshad A. Shahid National University of Computer and Emerging ... AK Brohi Road, H11/4 Islamabad, Pakistan, {muhammad.ramzan, arfan.jaffar}@nu.edu.pk, {amjad.iqbal, sajid.anwar,... more

- by Lauri Koskela and +1
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- Management, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Science