Name: PAULO SERGIO DOS SANTOS JUNIOR
Publication date: 20/12/2023
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| MONALESSA PERINI BARCELLOS | Advisor |
Summary: Software organizations face several challenges, such as the need for faster deliveries,
frequent changes in requirements, lower tolerance to failures, and the need to adapt to contemporary business models. Agile practices have allowed organizations to shorten development
cycles and increase customer collaboration. However, this has not been enough. Organizations
should evolve to continuous and data-driven development in a continuous software engineering
approach. Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) consists of a set of practices and tools that
support a holistic view of software development with the purpose of making it faster, iterative,
integrated, continuous, and aligned with the business. Software organizations often use different applications to support CSE (e.g., project management tools, source repositories, and
quality assessment tools). These applications store useful data to enable a data-driven software
development process. However, data items often remain spread in different applications, each
adopting different data and behavioral models, posing a barrier to integrated data usage. As a
consequence, data-driven software development is uncommon, missing valuable opportunities
for product and process improvement as well as new business opportunities identification.
Objective: Considering the need to enable data-driven software development in the CSE context,
we aim to provide an ontology-based approach that can aid in: identifying the organization’s
information needs, retrieving data from applications, and providing integrated data that meets
the information needs. Method: By following the Design Science paradigm and organizing
experimental studies as learning iterations, we developed the Immigrant approach, which
contains three components: California (a System-Thinking-based process), Zeppelin (a CSE
diagnostic instrument, which helps identify the organization information needs), and The Band
(an ontology-based integration solution that semantically integrates data from applications
and, thus, provides integrated data to support data-driven software development). The Band is
based on Continuum, an ontology (sub)network developed in this work to address CSE aspects
(particularly, agile development, continuous integration, and continuous deployment) and that
is used as a reference model to build software artifacts in the integration architecture. Results:
Studies performed in software organizations evaluated each component separately. Results
demonstrate California and Zeppelin’s usefulness and show that the integrated solution (The
Band) contributed to improving estimates, provided data that helped allocate teams, manage
team productivity and project performance, and allowed to identify and fix problems in the
software process execution. The complete proposal Immigrant was evaluated in a case study.
As a result, it was possible to identify problems related to the allocation of tasks, role overload,
and code quality. Conclusion: The results obtained so far suggest that Immigrant is a useful
approach to enable data-driven software development in CSE.
