DevOps is a new software engineering paradigm adopted by various software organizations to develop the quality software within time and budget. The implementation of DevOps practices is critical, and there are no guidelines to assess and improve the DevOps activities in software organizations. Hence, there is a need to develop a readiness model for DevOps (RMDevOps) with an aim to assist the practitioners

During the past decades, many studies have been carried out in an attempt to build accurate software development effort estimation techniques. However, none of the techniques proposed has proven to be successful at predicting software effort in all circumstances. Among these techniques, analogy‐based estimation has gained significant popularity within software engineering community because of its outstanding

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The volume at hand presents the special issue of the 12th International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) 2019, which was held in Montreal, Canada, from May 25 to 26, 2019. ICSSP 2019 is the latest in a series of conferences that have been organized by the International Software and Systems Process Association. In our evolving landscape, many companies are making efforts to move towards

In the effort to develop critical cyber‐physical systems, it is tempting to extend existing computing formalisms to include continuous behaviour. This may happen in a way that neglects elements necessary for correctly expressing continuous properties of the mathematics and correct physical properties of the real‐world physical system. A simple language is taken to illustrate these possibilities. Issues

In the context of digital transformation, companies are increasingly forced to develop, manage and continually align IT and business. Companies have found in Enterprise Architecture (EA) a valuable tool to represent and manage IT and business in a holistic way by establishing connections among technology concerns and business/strategical/motivational ones. EA modelling is one of the most critical tasks

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This volume comprises a selected set of high‐quality and extended articles of the 26th Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI) Conference, held during September 18–20, 2019 in Edinburgh, UK. Conferences were held in Dublin (Ireland) in 1994, in Vienna (Austria) in 1995, in Brighton (UK) in 1996, in Budapest (Hungary) in 1997, in Gothenburg (Sweden) in 1998, in Pori (Finland) in

Due to the pervasive use of online forums and social media, users' feedback are more accessible today and can be used within a requirements engineering context. However, such information is often fragmented, with multiple perspectives from multiple parties involved during on‐going interactions. In this paper, the authors propose a Crowd‐based Requirements Engineering approach by Argumentation (CrowdRE‐Arg)

Product Owners have an important role in the agile and hybrid software development process. While this role is supposed to maximize the value of a product, there seem to be several scattered results on how they achieve this, as well as what actually constitutes this role in practice. To consolidate current research results and to further analyze the key attribute of Product Owners, we conducted a multi‐method

Many fault localization approaches recently utilize deep learning to learn an effective localization model showing a fresh perspective with promising results. However, localization models are generally learned from class imbalance datasets; that is, the number of failing test cases is much fewer than passing test cases. It may be highly susceptible to affect the accuracy of learned localization models

In today's engineering projects, companies continuously have to adapt their systems to changing customers or dynamic market requirements. This requires a flexible, iterative development process in which different parts of the system under construction are built and updated concurrently. However, concurrent engineering becomes quite challenging in domains where different engineering artifacts from different

The concept of global software development was adopted by software organizations for the purpose of delivering quality software products at a reduced cost. Software reliability became one of the eminent challenges in the global software development. The main objective of this research paper is to develop a classification of the challenging factors in the global software development process faced by

Whatever be the nature of underlying software, the impact of the software development process that was used to create it would remain vital. The objective of this paper is to provide a process selection framework for the software development firm's engineers and managers, looking to identify the proper way to build software to run on a mobile, web, or desktop. The motivation behind this work comes

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The Software Process Improvement (SPI) Manifesto is based on three basic values: people, business focus and organisational change underpinning the philosophy of SPI. In turn, these values bring up to date certain SPI principles serving as a foundation for action in software development. The authors of this paper carried out a pilot expert validation of the sociocultural dimension of the sociocultural

To enter the production stage, in DevOps practices candidate software releases have to pass quality gates, where they are assessed to meet established target values for key indicators of interest. We believe software reliability should be an important such indicator, as it greatly contributes to the end‐user satisfaction. We propose DevOpRET , an approach for reliability testing as part of the acceptance

In global software development (GSD), software is developed by a team of geographically dispersed people. Many organizations that develop projects globally do not evaluate their project management readiness to undertake such projects.

Business process management (BPM) examines how work is performed in organizations. As environmental sustainability and context awareness are important to organizations, this study addresses two BPM calls. First, it focuses on the ecological impact of business processes. Second, this research recognizes the effect of an organization's business context when applying BPM. We have developed hypotheses

Planning and managing of requirement change management (RCM) process in global software development (GSD) are a complicated task, but the RCM plays a significant role in developing the quality software within time and budget. The key aim of this study is to prioritize the factors that could positively influence the RCM program in GSD context. To achieve the study objective, the questionnaire survey

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Software maintenance is an important phase in the software development life cycle. Software projects maintain bug repositories to gather, organize, and keep track of bug reports. These bug reports are resolved by numerous software developers. Whenever the reported bug does not get resolved by the assigned developer, he marks the resolution of bug report as Non‐Reproducible (NR). When NR bugs are reconsidered

During the last decades, software traceability has been studied in a large number of studies, from different perspectives (e.g., how to create traces and what are its benefits). This large body of knowledge needs to be better explored and exploited by both practitioners and researchers: We need an overview of different aspects of traceability and a structured way to assess and compare existing work

Free and open source software package ecosystems have existed for a long time, but such collaborative development practice has surged in recent years. One of the oldest and most popular package ecosystems is Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), the repository of packages of the statistical language R, a popular statistical computing environment. CRAN stores a large number of packages that are updated

Most of the software development projects have traditionally been faced with severe problems in terms of quality, cost, and time. Researchers and practitioners have focused on agile software development methods (ASDMs) as an alternative to overcome these problems. Agile methods employ iterative development cycles, interspersed by user feedback. Agile methods were basically developed for small development

Many software systems today provide support for adaptation and reconfiguration at runtime, in response to changes in their environment. Such adaptive systems are designed to run continuously and may not be shut down for reconfiguration or maintenance tasks. The variability of such systems has to be explicitly managed, together with mechanisms that control their runtime adaptation and reconfiguration

The social aspects of software development encompass concerns such as motivating practitioners, building effective teams, and developing personal relations. Not surprisingly, perhaps, many software projects fail due to personality conflicts within team members. This study investigates the personality traits of 132 software practitioners by employing a tailored interactive assessment that was specifically

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One of the main challenges of software testing research is the automated addition of oracles to the generated test cases: Whereas the automated generation of operation sequences (which is one of the essential components of test cases) is in practice a solved problem, the automated addition of the oracle (another indispensable element) is still an important problem and an open research question. This

Blockchain is considered as a major emerging technology that is having an ever‐increasing spread both in industrial and academic contexts. As the usage of blockchain keeps increasing, a fourth generation of blockchain platforms is being proposed. Thus, applications of blockchain have evolved towards wider scopes than cryptocurrency and asset management. In this context, it is important for practitioners

A smart contract (SC) is a programme stored in the Ethereum blockchain by a contract‐creation transaction. SC developers deploy an instance of the SC and attempt to execute it in exchange for a fee, paid in Ethereum coins (Ether). If the computation needed for their execution turns out to be larger than the effort proposed by the developer (i.e., the gasLimit), their client instantiation will not be

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Mutation testing is a fault‐based technique to test the quality of test suites by inducing artificial syntactic faults or mutants in a source program. However, some mutants have the same semantics as original program and cannot be detected by any test suite input known as equivalent mutants. Equivalent mutant problem (EMP) is undecidable as it requires manual human effort to identify a mutant as equivalent

Software Outsourcing Partnership (SOP) is considered as a kind of risk and reward sharing client‐vendor relationship. Generally, a fruitful outsourcing association might be converted to an outsourcing partnership. The objective of this research is to identify and analyse barriers that are hurdles to vendors in renewing or promoting their ongoing client‐vendor relationship to outsourcing partnership

Cross‐project defect prediction (CPDP) is needed when the target projects are new projects or the projects have less training data, since these projects do not have sufficient historical data to build high‐quality prediction models. The researchers have proposed many CPDP methods, and previous studies have conducted extensive comparisons on the performance of different CPDP methods. However, to the

Transactions have been used in many software sizing methods to measure software functional size and provide a basis for effort estimation. To further investigate the effects that transactions have on software functional size and more accurately estimate project effort using the transactional information, in this paper, we propose a method to identify transactions, as well as their complexity attributes

Requirements Change Management (RCM) is one of the challenges faced by Global Software Development (GSD) organisations as requirements evolution is inevitable due to dynamic business and operating environments. GSD organisations face issues when dealing with RCM because many organisations embark on GSD without understanding their readiness to undertake such an initiative. Currently, there is no readiness

Development and operations (DevOps) practices significantly accelerate and automate the continuous delivery and deployment of software systems. However, adopting DevOps concepts is not a straightforward job. Most organizations are not able to keep pace with the rhythm of continuous delivery and deployment, which are key DevOps attributes. Despite the significance of DevOps programs, it is still unknown

Global software development (GSD) has become a rising software development model in the last few years. Although much research has been performed in terms of GSD management, GSD governance research is scarce at the present time and presents multiple challenges that need to be addressed. In this paper, a systematic mapping study has been conducted, the aim of which was to discover the main issues dealt