preparing research projects for sustainable software engineering in society

Lehrstuhl Informatik 5(Information Systems)

Prof. Dr. M. Jarke1

LearningLayers

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Preparing Research Projects forSustainable Software Engineering

in Society

Dominik Renzel, István Koren,Ralf Klamma, Matthias Jarke

Advanced Community Information Systems (ACIS)RWTH Aachen University, Germany

[email protected]

39th International Conference on Software EngineeringMay 24, 2017Buenos Aires, Argentina


Prof. Dr. M. Jarke2

LearningLayers Agenda

■ Motivation■ Related Work■ Empirical Contexts■ Challenges■ DevOpsUse■ Lessons Learned■ Conclusion


Prof. Dr. M. Jarke3

LearningLayers

Sustainable Projects forSustainable Society

Most public research funding aims at sustainable solutions for societal

processes.

But most project results are not managed in a way that assists their

own sustainability.

We present a methodology and tool support to change that.

■ EU FP7 (2007-2013) „benefitting society“■ EU Horizon 2020 (2014-2020) „tackling

societal challenges“

■ Must be clearly addressed during projectlifetime

■ Lack of methodology and tool support fordistributed teams [Chitchyan et al. 2016]

■ Minimal viable product, open source, licensing, …

■ Startup, business plan, patenting, ...


Prof. Dr. M. Jarke4

LearningLayers Related Work

■ Research project context has gained interest in thelast years [Carver 2009]

■ Inherently different characteristics compared tocommercial IT projects [Carver et al. 2007]

– Goals– Nature of delivered artifacts– Internal processes

■ „Once-only projects“ expose risk of failing [Huijgens et al. 2014]

■ Need for supporting methodologies andinfrastructures [Ebrahim et al. 2017]


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Empirical Contexts of Large-ScaleEuropean Research Projects

2009 – 2013, 8.5M Euros16 partners from Europe and China

Personal Learning Environments

ROLE SDK: Widget-based platform

2012 – 2016, 13M Euros18 partners from Europe

Modular and flexible technologicallayers to support informal learning

Layers Box: Cloud-based deployment environment with OpenID Connect


Prof. Dr. M. Jarke6

LearningLayers

Software Engineering Challenges in Large-Scale Research Projects

Early Decisions Short Cycles Sustained

Impact

Distributed Community

Support Infrastructure Licensing

Stakeholder Engagement Baseline Unknown

Territory

SuccessAwareness

DecisionMaking


Prof. Dr. M. Jarke7

LearningLayers DevOps and End Users – DevOpsUse

where software is deployed

conflicts with traditional process

security and privacy issues

conflicts with traditional formative and summative evaluation in research

lack of experience

lack of tool support risk of

control loss

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Operationalizing DevOpsUse in Research Project Collaborations

• Developer Taskforce for short-term development issues• Architecture Board for long-term strategical decisions

Social DevOpsUse Instruments

• Automated collection of usage data• Awareness on quality and impact

Monitoring and Analysis

• Co-design teams• Demo sessions & hackathons

External Involvement


Prof. Dr. M. Jarke9

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Tool SupportInstrumentation Roadmap


Prof. Dr. M. Jarke10

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Social Requirements Engineering with Requirements Bazaar

■ Traditional RE unsustainable for large-scale research■ End users conceive issue trackers as intimidating■ Social Requirements Engineering (SRE) for

requirements negotiation among non-technical end users and professional developers [Renzel et al. 2013]

à https://requirements-bazaar.org– Discussion and negotation between stakeholders– Export to issue tracker– Keep users aware of development progress



LearningLayers Lessons Learned

People • Give voice to stakeholders• Trace changes of requirements and priorities

Open Source Development

• Clarify licensing• Reach out to OSS communities as integral part of project

dissemination

Automation & Integration

• Regression test and do automated builds• Take care of compatibility of tools

Awareness • Create and sustain awareness of software engineering activities• Introduce tools for monitoring and analytics

Time • Start early with providing the development infrastructure• Use widely used and well-established, industry-strength products



LearningLayers Conclusion

■ Research gap of methodologies and technical infrastructuresfor sustainable software engineering in research projects

■ Challenges identified in two large-scale empirical contexts■ DevOpsUse methodology with strong focus on end user

inclusion and awareness■ Limitations

– Findings project-dependent– Any software engineering methodology evolves in parallel with

artifacts it produces



LearningLayers Outlook

■ Socio-technical systems and development methodsneed to be embedded in sustainability strategies forsocietal impact

■ Strategies needed beyond funded research projects■ Adopt end user integration and co-design beyond

software engineering– Embedding co-design in existing tools– Requirements Bazaar as societal innovation platform



LearningLayers References

[Carver et al. 2007] J. C. Carver, R. P. Kendall, S. E. Squires, and D. E. Post, “Software Development Environments for Scientific and Engineering Software: A Series of Case Studies,” in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society, 2007, pp. 550–559. [Carver 2009] J. C. Carver, “First International Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational Science & Engineering,” Computing in Science & Engineering, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 7–11, 2009. [Chitchyan et al. 2016] R. Chitchyan, C. Becker, S. Betz, L. Duboc, B. Penzenstadler, N. Seyff, and C. C. Venters, “Sustainability Design in Requirements Engineering: State of Practice,” in Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2016, pp. 533–542. [Ebrahim et al. 2017] N. A. Ebrahim, S. Ahmed, and Z. Taha, “Establishing Virtual R&D Teams: Obliged Policy. CoRR, abs/1208.0994,” 2012. [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.0944 (last access: Feb 2017).[Huijgens et al. 2014] H.Huijgens,R.vanSolingen,andA.vanDeursen,“Howtobuildagood practice software project portfolio?” in 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE ’14, Companion Proceedings, P. Jalote, L. Briand, and A. van der Hoek, Eds. ACM, 2014, pp. 64–73. [Renzel et al. 2013] D. Renzel, M. Behrendt, R. Klamma, and M. Jarke, “Requirements Bazaar: Social Requirements Engineering for Community-Driven In- novation,” in 2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) Proceedings. Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Com- puterSociety, 2013, pp. 326–327.



LearningLayers fin

preparing research projects for sustainable software engineering in society

Leadership & Management