Paulo Meirelles

Phyllipe Lima, Jorge Melegati, Everaldo Gomes et al.

Code annotations is a widely used feature in Java systems to configure custom metadata on programming elements. Their increasing presence creates the need for approaches to assess and comprehend their usage and distribution. In this context, software visualization has been studied and researched to improve program comprehension in different aspects. This study aimed at designing a software visualization approach that graphically displays how code annotations are distributed and organized in a software system and developing a tool, as a reference implementation of the approach, to generate views and interact with users. We conducted an empirical evaluation through questionnaires and interviews to evaluate our visualization approach considering four aspects: effectiveness for program comprehension, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and suitability for the intended audience. The resulting data was used to perform a qualitative and quantitative analysis. The tool identifies package responsibilities providing visual information about their annotations at different levels. Using the developed tool, the participants achieved a high correctness rate in the program comprehension tasks and performed very well in questions about the overview of the system under analysis. Finally, participants perceived that the tool outperforms existing approaches for code inspection when searching for information related to code annotations. The results show that the visualization approach using the developed tool is effective in program comprehension tasks related to code annotations, which can also be used to identify responsibilities in the application packages. Moreover, it was evaluated as suitable for newcomers to overview the usage of annotations in the system and for architects to perform a deep analysis that can potentially detect misplaced annotations and abnormal growths on their usage.

Leonardo Leite, Gustavo Pinto, Fabio Kon et al.

Context: To accelerate time-to-market and improve customer satisfaction, software-producing organizations have adopted continuous delivery practices, impacting the relations between development and infrastructure professionals. Yet, no substantial literature has substantially tackled how the software industry structures the organization of development and infrastructure teams. Objective: In this study, we investigate how software-producing organizations structure their development and infrastructure teams, specifically how is the division of labor among these groups and how they interact. Method: After brainstorming with 7 DevOps experts to better formulate our research and procedures, we collected and analyzed data from 37 semi-structured interviews with IT professionals, following Grounded Theory guidelines. Results: After a careful analysis, we identified four common organizational structures: (1) siloed departments, (2) classical DevOps, (3) cross-functional teams, and (4) platform teams. We also observed that some companies are transitioning between these structures. Conclusion: The main contribution of this study is a theory in the form of a taxonomy that organizes the found structures along with their properties. This theory could guide researchers and practitioners to think about how to better structure development and infrastructure professionals in software-producing organizations.

Leonardo Leite, Carla Rocha, Fabio Kon et al.

DevOps is a collaborative and multidisciplinary organizational effort to automate continuous delivery of new software updates while guaranteeing their correctness and reliability. The present survey investigates and discusses DevOps challenges from the perspective of engineers, managers, and researchers. We review the literature and develop a DevOps conceptual map, correlating the DevOps automation tools with these concepts. We then discuss their practical implications for engineers, managers, and researchers. Finally, we critically explore some of the most relevant DevOps challenges reported by the literature.