Salome Maro

Salome Maro, Jan-Philipp Steghöfer, Eric Knauss et al.

Practitioners are poorly supported by the scientific literature when managing traceability information models (TIMs), which capture the structure and semantics of trace links. In practice, companies manage their TIMs in very different ways, even in cases where companies share many similarities. We present our findings from an in-depth focus group about TIM management with three different systems engineering companies. We find that the concrete needs of the companies as well as challenges such as scale and workflow integration are not considered by existing scientific work. We thus issue a call-to-arms for the requirements engineering and software and systems traceability communities, the two main communities for traceability research, to refocus their work on these practical problems.

Rebekka Wohlrab, Jennifer Horkoff, Rashidah Kasauli et al.

Large-scale companies commonly face the challenge of managing relevant knowledge between different organizational groups, particularly in increasingly agile contexts. In previous studies, we found the importance of analyzing methodological islands (i.e., groups using different development methods than the surrounding organization) and boundary objects between them. In this paper, we propose a metamodel to better capture and analyze coordination and knowledge management in practice. Such a metamodel can allow practitioners to describe current practices, analyze issues, and design better-suited coordination mechanisms. We evaluated the conceptual model together with four large-scale companies developing complex systems. In particular, we derived an initial list of bad smells that can be leveraged to detect issues and devise suitable improvement strategies for inter-team coordination in large-scale development. We present the model, smells, and our evaluation results.

Rashidah Kasauli, Rebekka Wohlrab, Eric Knauss et al.

Large-scale system development companies are increasingly adopting agile methods. While this adoption may improve lead-times, such companies need to balance two trade-offs: (i) the need to have a uniform, consistent development method on system level with the need for specialised methods for teams in different disciplines(e.g., hardware, software, mechanics, sales, support); (ii) the need for comprehensive documentation on system level with the need to have lightweight documentation enabling iterative and agile work. With specialised methods for teams, isolated teams work within larger ecosystems of plan-driven culture, i.e., teams become agile "islands". At the boundaries, these teams share knowledge which needs to be managed well for a correct system to be developed. While it is useful to support diverse and specialised methods, it is important to understand which islands are repeatedly encountered, the reasons or factors triggering their existence, and how best to handle coordination between them. Based on a multiple case study, this work presents a catalogue of islands and the boundary objects between them. We believe this work will be beneficial to practitioners aiming to understand their ecosystems and researchers addressing communication and coordination challenges in large-scale development.