Understanding Emerging Practice in Software Development

Software defines, drives, and enables innovation in the systems we use in essentially all areas of modern human activity, including science, engineering, business, government, entertainment, education, energy, defense, health and medicine. As reliance on software grows, society makes exponentially greater demands on the diversity and quality of the software being developed. The core idea of the project was to meet these growing needs and to contribute to a renewal of the software engineering discipline by providing significant advances in our understanding of the reflexive relationship between emerging theories and new patterns of actions in software development. Such understanding is a key step toward solving deep and important open research problems in the science and engineering of software. The project investigated two fundamental dimensions of the software challenge: the formalization challenge and the distribution challenge. Agile project management breaks away from the linear sequence of well-defined activities and shifts focus from up-front planning to execution. In doing so, agile project management moves away from traditional command and control structures to shared decision-making, self-management, and learning in software teams to deal with the complexity and unpredictability of the problem-solving activities of software projects. The project focused on the experiences of managing large projects with extensive use of agile principles. One example was the Perform project for the Norwegian Public Service Pension Fund. The main experience is that agile principles are appropriate not only for projects where we cannot define requirements up front, but that such principles can also be successfully combined with traditional project management into a new type of agile project management that is suitable for large-scale software development. Even though agile methods actively encourage collaboration among all stakeholders, most agile projects do not extend themselves toward the operational level. In contrast, DevOps is an emerging technology and a conceptual framework for integrating development and operations. The Emerge project developed a collection of principles and practices that intend to improve the collaboration between development and operations, especially in situations in which the personnel is distributed in time and space. During the project, several academic days and workshops were held, both company-internal ones, as well as ones organized by the Norwegian Computer Society, focusing on the integration of DevOps principles with emphasis on agile testing and agile project management. As input to future work, we see a trend on shifting the learning strategy from focus on efficiency to agility, which will allow organizations to adjust swiftly in an uncertain future. A learning organization, as introduced by author and MIT lecturer Peter Senge, is one that continuously facilitates learning for its people and transforms the organization as needed. There is a need for rethinking how the software organizations are organized as a whole in order to become a learning organization.

Resultatene i dette forskningsprosjektet har forbedret økonomi og kvalitet ved produkter og tjenester i den FoU-intensive delen av programvareindustrien. EMERGE har utviklet ny kunnskap om det refleksive samspillet mellom teorier og praksiser i programvareutvikling. Relaterte evidens-baserte retningslinjer er utviklet, og programmerere og andre systemutviklere har blitt lært opp til å følge disse retningslinjene for raskt å kunne omsette den nye kunnskapen i konkret handling. De empiriske resultatene fra prosjektet har bidratt til høyere kvalitet og bedre utnyttelse av ressurser og således forbedret konkurranseevnen til IT-firmaer. EMERGE har også forbedret undervisning i informatikk ved at både teoretiske og empiriske resultater fra prosjektet har blitt inkludert i pensum ved diverse kurs i programmering og systemutvikling ved UiO og NTNU. De mange studentene ved disse kursene vil derfor være bedre forberedt i sine viktige roller i det 21. århundrets informasjonssamfunn.

Software defines, drives, and enables innovation in the systems we use in essentially all areas of modern human activity, including science, engineering, business, government, entertainment, education, energy, defense, health and medicine. As reliance on software grows, society makes exponentially greater demands on the diversity and quality of the software being developed. The core idea of the project is to meet these growing needs and to contribute to a renewal of the software engineering discipline b y providing significant advances in our understanding of the reflexive relationship between emerging theories and new patterns of actions in software development. Such understanding is a key step toward solving deep and important open research problems in the science and engineering of software. The project will investigate two fundamental dimensions of software challenge: the formalization challenge and the distribution challenge. An explicit target of the project is the development of breakthrough int erdisciplinary knowledge that address today's exploding complexity of software systems. Major progress in mastering this complexity will be achieved by leveraging existing scientific excellence and needs for future solutions in industry and public sector. The project will accelerate the transfer of software-oriented research findings to create a lasting impact on the competitive advantage of the Norwegian software-intensive industry and resolving long-term societal needs. The group behind the project has an excellent track record for creating relevant and readily available scientific knowledge to solve important problems for developers and users of software-intensive systems. For both challenges, we intend to perform the research in close collaboration w ith scientists with vast experience in the field and to invite promising young talents from outstanding groups for stays in the project, thereby helping to increase the scientific quality of our group.