Jan-Peter Ostberg

Philipp Diebold, Jan-Peter Ostberg, Stefan Wagner et al.

Background: Agile software development has become a popular way of developing software. Scrum is the most frequently used agile framework, but it is often reported to be adapted in practice. Objective: Thus, we aim to understand how Scrum is adapted in different contexts and what are the reasons for these changes. Method: Using a structured interview guideline, we interviewed ten German companies about their concrete usage of Scrum and analysed the results qualitatively. Results: All companies vary Scrum in some way. The least variations are in the Sprint length, events, team size and requirements engineering. Many users varied the roles, effort estimations and quality assurance. Conclusions: Many variations constitute a substantial deviation from Scrum as initially proposed. For some of these variations, there are good reasons. Sometimes, however, the variations are a result of a previous non-agile, hierarchical organisation.

Jan-Peter Ostberg, Daniel Graziotin, Stefan Wagner et al.

Software development is intellectual, based on collaboration, and performed in a highly demanding economic market. As such, it is dominated by time pressure, stress, and emotional trauma. While studies of affect are emerging and rising in software engineering research, stress has yet to find its place in the literature despite that it is highly related to affect. In this paper, we study stress coping with the affect-laden framework of Salutogenesis, which is a validated psychological framework for enhancing mental health through a feeling of coherence. We propose a controlled experiment for testing our hypotheses that a static analysis tool enhanced with the Salutogenesis model will bring 1) a higher number of fixed quality issues, 2) reduced cognitive load, 3) reduction of the overall stress, and 4) positive affect induction effects to developers. The experiment will make use of validated physiological measurements of stress as proxied by cortisol and alpha-amylase levels in saliva samples, a psychometrically validated measurement of mood and affect disposition, and stress inductors such as a cognitive load task. Our hypotheses, if empirically supported, will lead to the creation of environments, methods, and tools that alleviate stress among developers while enhancing affect on the job and task performance.

Jan-Peter Ostberg, Stefan Wagner

The results of an automatic static analysis run can be overwhelming, especially for beginners. The overflow of information and the resulting need for many decisions is mentally tiring and can cause stress symptoms. There are several models in health care which are designed to fight stress. One of these is the salutogenesis model created by Aaron Antonovsky. In this paper, we will present an idea on how to transfer this model into a triage and recommendation model for static analysis tools and give an example of how this can be implemented in FindBugs, a static analysis tool for Java.

Daniel Kulesz, Jan-Peter Ostberg

Just like other software, spreadsheets can contain significant faults. Static analysis is an accepted and well-established technique in software engineering known for its capability to discover faults. In recent years, a growing number of tool vendors started offering tools that allow casual end-users to run various static analyses on spreadsheets as well. We supervised a study where three undergraduate software engineering students examined a selection of 14 spreadsheet auditing tools, trying to give a concrete recommendation for an industry partner. Reflecting on the study's results, we found that most of these tools do provide useful aids in finding problems in spreadsheets, but we have also spotted several areas where tools had significant issues. Some of these issues could be remedied if spreadsheet auditing tool vendors would pick up some ideas of static analysis tools for traditional software development and adopt some of their solution approaches.