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Results and lessons learned in System, Software & Service Process Improvement & Innovation

2016; Wiley; Volume: 28; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/smr.1833

2047-7481

Miklós Bíró, Richard Messnarz, Ricardo Colomo‐Palacios,

Safety Systems Engineering in Autonomy

A typical characterization of EuroSPI was stated by a company using the following words: “… the biggest value of EuroSPI lies in its function as a European knowledge and experience exchange mechanism for SPI and innovation.” EuroSPI22015 was held on September 30 to October 2, 2015, at Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey, in cooperation with the Turkish Standards Institution (TSE). To emphasize Europe and Asia wide SPI collaboration, the conference was held in Turkey. The Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology of the Republic of Turkey, the Turkish Standards Institution, and Turkish industry participated at the conference. In 2015, EuroSPI2 continued with the open workshop communities aligned with the conference and focusing on specific SPI topics. This included in 2014 the communities for Creating Environments Supporting Innovation and Improvement, SPI and Product-System-Software Design with a focus on Functional Safety, SPI manager education based on the SPI Manifesto, and SPICE assessors exchanging experiences about best practices to implement traceability. The EuroSPI 2015 program had 4 international workshops on day 1, and international key notes on conference days 2 and 3, more than 60 presentations from leading industry and research institutions, and a joint paper award with the American Society of Quality. Among the 18 countries represented at EuroSPI22015, the contributions were highly relevant for the European and worldwide industry also appearing in this special issue. The SPI Manifesto, from 2009, created a future vision. The extension of SPI to the systems and product level led to the involvement of major European firms. The building of workshop communities for specific topics created further networking opportunities, and the contributions included good practices for their achievement. Systems, software, and services process improvement is meanwhile a major learning and success factor worldwide for staying competitive on a global and dynamically developing world market. In 2015, Ankara University hosted the conference and the Turkish Standards Institution (TSE) supported the conference, provided a key note and acted as a coeditor of the proceedings. EuroSPI received a large amount of submissions that were peer-reviewed by top experts in the field. From this first set of papers, and based on the reviews, 9 high-quality articles were selected for publication in this special issue. After more than 20 years of SPI experiences and approaches published and discussed at EuroSPI conferences, the set of papers of the 2015 edition reflects the evolution of the methods and appraisals of the software engineering discipline. The contributions of these papers are summarized in the following paragraphs. The paper “Experience report: implementing requirement traceability throughout the software development life cycle” by Akman, Aydin, Göktürk, and Özmut tells the experience of an IT solutions provider with requirements traceability and its support in integrated tools. Although the problem of requirements traceability is not new,1 there are recent advances in the topic,2, 3 and previous practical experiences and lessons learned on requirements traceability have been widely discussed in the EuroSPI community.4-8 This paper is a case study on the construction of a framework to support requirements traceability in a professional setting. In “Objective-driven Process Appraisals: An educational Experiment” by De Man, the author reports an experience of teaching software process improvement by means of 1-minute cases as well as exercises to support objective-driven appraisal for software organizations. Software process education is one of the most important pillars in the EuroSPI community, and although there are some drawbacks detected in the literature,9 this is an open topic for the discipline. Not in vain, recently, a set of members of the community built the blocks for a Manifesto for Software Process Education, Training, and Professionalism10 that will be issued by the end of 2016. As a result of this interest, there are several initiatives in the community on SPI education in aspects like applying process appraisals at a university11 and many previous reports on certification efforts, eg, the works of Johansen et al, De man, and Korsaa.10-12 In the paper “Refactoring Technical Support to Reduce Interrupts of Developers,” Kelemen, Tódor, Hodosi, and Somfai present a study devoted to identifying process improvement actions for reducing interrupts of developers. Again, the issue of interrupts in software development is a traditional topic for software engineering researchers.13, 14 Productivity in general is also a long-time research topic for researchers.15-19 “Assessing ISO/IEC29110 by means of ITMark: results from an experience factory” is authored by Larrucea, Santamaria, and Colomo-Palacios. The paper introduces a mapping on ITMark and ISO/IEC 29110 and also a study to test the applicability of the assessments made by ITMark in the ISO/IEC 29110 environment. ISO/IEC 29110 is devoted to SMEs and small teams, and this has been, again, one of the main topics of EuroSPI researchers in the past. Software Quality Journal published a Special Issue on the topic,20 and papers contained there include aspects like risk in software testing21 and practices actually used by companies,22 naming just 2 of the most important papers published in the special section. However, there is a long tail of papers published in previous editorial efforts on SPI and SMEs by members of the community, eg, the studies of Mesquida and Mas, and Larrucea et al.23, 24 The paper “Lessons learned from four years empowering Project Management with TALAIA OpenPPM” by Mas, Mesquida, Jovanović, and Barceló is telling the story of an open source solution for managing projects, programs, and portfolios and its application in several companies from different sectors adopting a lessons learned approach. Apart from the traditional topic of tool development, 2 main pillars are supporting the paper in terms of research topics: project management and service portfolio management. Regarding the first topic, several works have tackled the subject in recent papers dealing with project management in small settings,25 compliance with PMBOK23 or process reference models26 and regarding service portfolio Management. Papers dealing with the topic include ITIL implementation sequence suggestions27 or the TIPA framework.28 Majchrowski, Ponsard, Saadaoui, Flamand, and Deprez wrote the paper entitled “Software Development Practices in Small Entities: an ISO29110-based Survey” dealing again with the topic of SPI in SME settings. The paper “Effectivity and economical aspects for agile quality assurance in large enterprises” by Poth deals with software quality management implemented by means of an agile approach. This approach is mapped to the SPI Manifesto, one of the main contributions of the EuroSPI community to the discipline. Following previous works, eg, the work of Poth and Sunyaev,29 this paper demonstrates that agility can be also applied to software quality management efforts. Peter Rust, Derek Flood, and Fergal McCaffery are the authors of the paper entitled “Creation of an IEC 62304 compliant Software Development Plan.” The standard IEC 62304, “Medical device software—Software life-cycle processes,” has also been studied vastly by scholars, eg, Mäder and Egyed, and Picard et al5, 28. In this paper, authors present a software development plan template designed to help organizations in the planning of software projects for the medical domain. The final paper in the set is “A Method to Realize Traceability in Development Processes” and is investigating the traceability problem from a global perspective. After reviewing the main aspects of traceability in standards, the authors present a method for documenting information flows in a single product environment and also its extension to multiproduct settings. In summary, this special issue contains high-quality contributions reflecting important recent results and lessons learned in System, Software & Service Process Improvement & Innovation. The editors would like to express their thanks to the members of the EuroSPI22015 Industrial Programme Committee for their contribution to the review and selection of the papers: Bæk Jørgensen Jens Mjølner Informatics A/S Denmark; Baer Cristina Continental Engineering Services Germany; Breske Eva Robert Bosch GmbH Germany; Daughtrey Tazewell James Madison University USA; Dekkers Carol Quality Plus Technologies USA; Dussa-Zieger Klaudia Method Park Software AG Germany; Ekert Damjan ISCN GmbH Austria; Fehrer Detlef SICK AG Germany; Forselius Pekka 4SUM Partners Finland; Hagenmeyer Philipp ZF Friedrichshafen AG Germany; Hallikas Jarmo Falcon Leader Oy Finland; Hällmayer Frank Software Factory GmbH Germany; Ivanyos Janos Trusted Business Partners Kft Hungary; Johansen Jørn Whitebox Denmark; Johansson Mika FiSMA Finland; König Frank ZF Friedrichshafen AG Germany; Messnarz Richard ISCN Ltd Austria/Ireland; Nevalainen Risto FiSMA Finland; Poth Alexander Volkswagen AG Germany; Renault Samuel Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor Luxembourg; Sauberer Gabriele TermNet Austria; Schweigert Tomas SQS Software Quality Systems AG Germany; Sechser Bernhard Method Park Germany; Spork Gunther Magna Powertrain Austria; Stefanova-Pavlova Maria Center for Innovation and Technology Transfer-Global Bulgaria; Von Bronk Peter Systemberatung Software-Qualität Germany; and Wegner Thomas ZF Friedrichshafen AG Germany. The editorial work of this special issue has been supported by the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology, the Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy, and the Province of Upper Austria in the frame of the COMET center SCCH. Some contributions published in this volume have been funded with support from the European Commission. EuroSPI has been organized for 23 years and continues in the next years. EuroSPI 2016 takes place in Graz, Austria, EuroSPI 2017 in Ostrava, Czech Republic, etc. EuroSPI2 established on YouTube an Online library of key notes where leading SPI industry and researchers are presenting. This allows free access to key development ideas of SPI and will help creating a network for SPI around EuroSPI using new media. The key notes can be found at http://www.eurospi.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=26. Also the European Certification and Qualification Association (www.ecqa.org, ECQA), which was founded on the basis of EuroSPI to package and certify key professions and skills, is growing worldwide. In 2015, Japanese SW Process Improvement Consortium (JASPIC representing over 100 world-leading Japanese companies) signed an agreement with ECQA and organized a first SPI manager training in Tokyo with EuroSPI partners. Also in 2015, leading automotive industry managers were trained in the framework of the ECQA certified functional safety manager training. The strategic skills alliance Automotive Quality Knowledge Alliance (AQUA) got promoted and continued with an Automotive Quality Universities (AQU) project where the quality principles created with EuroSPI contributors are now taught at universities across Europe at masters level, including University of Technology Graz, Austria, University of Applied Sciences Joanneum, Graz, Austria, Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic, University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf, Germany, and Grenoble Institute of Technology, France. In 2015, the EuroSPI initiative, having signed an agreement with the American Society of Quality, Software Division years ago, agreed to more closely collaborate with the United States. Starting with 2015, there is an annual joint magazine in Software Quality Professional with EuroSPI papers focusing on functional safety and IT security topics.