You are granted permission for the non-commercial reproduction, distribution, display, and performance of this technical report in any format. However, this permission is only for a period of 45 (forty-five) days from the most recent time that you verified that this technical report is still available from the Department of Computer Science of the University of Maryland at College Park under terms that include this permission. All other rights are reserved by the author(s).
Organizational Issues in Software Development:An Empirical Study of. Carolyn B. Seaman. December 1996.
The subject of this dissertation is an empirical study whose goal is to characterize certain aspects of communication among members of a software development organization. The independent variables in this study are various attributes of organizational structure. The dependent variable is the effort spent on sharing information which is required by the code inspection process in use. The research questions upon which the study is based ask whether or not these attributes of organizational structure have an effect on the amount of communication effort expended. In addition, several other variables have been included, such as code size and complexity, which represent factors other than organizational structure which may have an effect on communication effort. The study uses both quantitative and qualitative methods for data collection and analysis. These methods include participant observation, structured interviews, graphical data presentation, and interpretation of statistical results with qualitative anecdotes. In addition, a pilot study was conducted to test this combination of methods. The findings, which are presented as a set of hypotheses, show that all of the organizational structure characteristics studied do have an effect on communication effort, at least in some circumstances. The work described in this dissertation helps to enable a whole new area of research, by illustrating one effective way of conducting such investigations, and by providing some hypotheses with which to begin. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-96-94) University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Maryland,
Communication and Organization in Software Development: An Empirical Study. April 1996.
Carolyn B. Seaman. Victor R. Basili. The empirical study described in this paper addresses the issue of communication among members of a software development organization. The independent variables are various attributes of organizational structure. The dependent variable is the effort spent on sharing information which is required by the software development process in use. The research questions upon which the study is based ask whether or not these attributes of organizational structure have an effect on the amount of communication effort expended. In addition, there are a number of blocking variables which have been identified. These are used to account for factors other than organizational structure which may have an effect on communication effort. The study uses both quantitative and qualitative methods for data collection and analysis. These methods include participant observation, structured interviews, and graphical data presentation. The results of this study indicate that several attributes of organizational structure do affect communication effort, but not in a simple, straightforward way. In particular, the distances between communicators in the reporting structure of the organization, as well as in the physical layout of offices, affects how quickly they can share needed information, especially during meetings. These results provide a better understanding of how organizational structure helps or hinders communication in software development. This work was supported in part IBM's Centre for Advanced Studies, and by NASA grant NSG-5123. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-96-23) Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Maryland, University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies,
Qualitative Analysis for Maintenance Process Assessment. Lionel Briand. Yong-Mi Kim. Walcelio L. Melo. Carolyn B. Seaman. Victor R. Basili. January 1996.
In order to improve software maintenance processes, we first need to be able to characterize and assess them. These tasks must be performed in depth and with objectivity since the problems are complex. One approach is to set up a measurement-based software process improvement program specifically aimed at maintenance. However, establishing a measurement program requires that one understands the problems to be addressed by the measurement program and is able to characterize the maintenance environment and processes in order to collect suitable and cost-effective data. Also, enacting such a program and getting usable data sets takes time. A short term substitute is therefore needed. We propose in this paper a characterization process aimed specifically at maintenance and based on a general qualitative analysis methodology. This process is rigorously defined in order to be repeatable and usable by people who are not acquainted with such analysis procedures. A basic feature of our approach is that actual implemented software changes are analyzed in order to understand the flaws in the maintenance process. Guidelines are provided and a case study is shown that demonstrates the usefulness of the approach. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-96-7) University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Maryland,
Lionel Briand. Walcelio L. Melo. Carolyn B. Seaman. Victor R. Basili. Characterizing and Assessing a Large-Scale Software Maintenance. November 1994.
One important component of a software process is the organizational context in which the process is enacted. This component is often missing or incomplete in current process modeling approaches. One technique for modeling this perspective is the Actor-Dependency (AD) Model. This paper reports on a case study which used this approach to analyze and assess a large software maintenance organization. Our goal was to identify the approach's strengths and weaknesses while providing practical recommendations for improvement. The AD model was found to be very useful in capturing the important properties of the organizational context of the maintenance process, and aided in the understanding of the flaws found in this process. However, a number of opportunities for extending and improving the AD model were identified. Among others, there is a need to incorporate quantitative information to complement the qualitative model. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-94-112) University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Maryland,
Last Generated Fri Aug 11 04:01:01 EDT 2000