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The purpose of this mapping study has been performed to identify, critically analyze and synthesize research performed in the area of software engineering teams. Teams, in a general sense, have been studied extensively. But the distinctive processes that need to be executed effectively and efficiently in software engineering require a better understanding of current software engineering team research.

In this work, software engineering team publications were analyzed and the key findings of each paper that met our search inclusion criteria were synthesized. In addition, a keyword content analysis was performed to create a taxonomy to categorize each paper and evaluate the state of software engineering team research.

In software engineering team research, the resulting areas that are the most active are teamwork/collaboration, process/design and coordination. Clear themes of analysis have been determined to help understand how team members collaborate, factors affecting their success and interactions among all project stakeholders. In addition, themes related to tools to support team collaboration, improve the effectiveness of software engineering processes and support team coordination have been found. However, the research gaps determined from the content analysis point toward a need for more research in the area of communication and tools.

The goal of this work is to define the span of previous research in this area, create a taxonomy to categorize such research and identify open research areas to provide a clear road map for future research in the area of software engineering teams. These results, along with the key finding themes presented, will help guide future research in an area that touches all parts of the software engineering and development processes.

The aim of this paper is to make an attempt to find good values of onsite–offshore team strength; number of hours of communication between business users and onsite team and between onsite and offshore team to reduce cost and improve schedule for re-engineering projects in global software development environment.

The system dynamics technique is used for simulation model construction and policy run experimentation. The experts from Indian software outsourcing industry were consulted for model construction, validation and analysis of policy run results in both co-located and distributed software development environment.

The study results show that there is a drop in the overall team productivity in outsourcing environment by considering the offshore options. But the project cost can be reduced by employing the offshore team for coding and testing work only with minimal training for imparting business knowledge. The research results show that there is a potential to save project cost by being flexible in project schedule.

The study found that there could be substantial cost saving for re-engineering projects with a loss of project schedule when an appropriate onsite–offshore combination is used. The quality and productivity drop, however, were rather small for such combinations. The cost savings are high when re-engineering work is sent to offshore location entirely after completion of requirement analysis work at onsite location and providing training to offshore team in business knowledge The research findings show that there is potential to make large cost savings by being flexible in project schedule for re-engineering projects.

The software project manager can use the model results to divide the software team between onsite and offshore location during various phases of software development in distributed environment.

The study is novel as there is little attempt at finding the team distribution between onsite and offshore location in global software development environment.

This paper aims to close the gap between the generic concept of knowledge activities (KAs) and implementing them in the context of software engineering organisations concentrating on the non-technical aspects, such as team organisation and practices.

This qualitative research used a questionnaire with practitioners such as software developers and team leads who were asked to provide feedback on a set of team practices and measures typically used in software engineering projects and assess their relation to the activities of acquiring, codifying, storing, maintaining, transferring and creating knowledge. The obtained results were analysed using frequency analysis and further descriptive statistics yielding a matrix linking the investigated team practices and measures to KAs.

Team practices and measures commonly applied in software engineering can be facilitated to trigger particular KAs. While most of these team practices and measures originate from agile methods, they are not restricted to these. A purposeful composition can help in assembling a balanced set of KAs aimed at fostering given knowledge goals in software engineering organisations.

By bridging the communication and terminology gap between knowledge management research and software engineering practitioners, this work lays the foundation for assessing software teams’ knowledge profiles more easily and creating prerequisites for implementing knowledge management by facilitating common practices and measures often already part of their daily work. Hence, overhead can be avoided when implementing knowledge management.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study investigating application and relevance of KAs in the software industry by linking them to practices and measures well-accepted in software engineering, thus providing the necessary vocabulary for the implementation of knowledge management in software development teams.

Today’s software engineers often work in teams to develop complex software systems. Therefore, successful software engineering in practice require team members to possess not only sound programming skills such as analysis, design, coding and testing but also soft skills such as communication, collaboration and self-management. However, existing examination-based assessments are often inadequate for quantifying students’ soft skill development. The purpose of this paper is to explore alternative ways for assessing software engineering students’ skills through a data-driven approach.

In this paper, the exploratory data analysis approach is adopted. Leveraging the proposed online agile project management tool – Human-centred Agile Software Engineering (HASE), a study was conducted involving 21 Scrum teams consisting of over 100 undergraduate software engineering students in multi-week coursework projects in 2014.

During this study, students performed close to 170,000 software engineering activities logged by HASE. By analysing the collected activity trajectory data set, the authors demonstrate the potential for this new research direction to enable software engineering educators to have a quantifiable way of understanding their students’ skill development, and take a proactive approach in helping them improve their programming and soft skills.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there has yet to be published previous studies using software engineering activity data to assess software engineers’ skills.

Often, it is assumed that teams are better at solving problems than individuals working independently. However, recent work in engineering, design and psychology contradicts this assumption. This study aims to examine the behavior of teams engaged in data science competitions. Crowdsourced competitions have seen increased use for software development and data science, and platforms often encourage teamwork between participants.

We specifically examine the teams participating in data science competitions hosted by Kaggle. We analyze the data provided by Kaggle to compare the effect of team size and interaction frequency on team performance. We also contextualize these results through a semantic analysis.

This work demonstrates that groups of individuals working independently may outperform interacting teams on average, but that small, interacting teams are more likely to win competitions. The semantic analysis revealed differences in forum participation, verb usage and pronoun usage when comparing top- and bottom-performing teams.

These results reveal a perplexing tension that must be explored further: true teams may experience better performance with higher cohesion, but nominal teams may perform even better on average with essentially no cohesion. Limitations of this research include not factoring in team member experience level and reliance on extant data.

These results are potentially of use to designers of crowdsourced data science competitions as well as managers and contributors to distributed software development projects.

This paper is a case study on the successful application of Six Sigma methodology in the information technology industry. The purpose of this paper is to improve the resolution time performance of an application support process.

Through brainstorming, the potential factors influencing the resolution time are identified. From the potential factors, the important factors, namely, day-wise ticket volume, team’s software engineering skill and domain expertise are shortlisted using test of hypothesis, correlation, etc. Then a model is developed using principal component regression, linking the critical to quality characteristic with the root causes or important factors. Finally, a solution methodology is developed using the model to obtain the team composition and size with optimum software skill and domain expertise to resolve the tickets within the required time.

The implementation of the solution resulted in improving the process performance significantly. The process performance index increased from 0.00 to 1.2 and parts per million reduced from 501366.31 to 153. 33.

The software engineers can use the similar approach to improve the performance of core software activities such as coding, testing and bug fixing. The approach can also be used for improving the performance of other skill-based operations such as error reduction in medical diagnostics.

This is one of the rare Six Sigma case studies on improving skill-based processes such as software development. The study also demonstrates the usefulness of the Six Sigma methodology for solving dynamic problems whose solution needs to be continuously adjusted with the changes in the input or process conditions.

This paper aims to explore the changes imposed by the general data protection regulation (GDPR) on software engineering practices. The fundamental objective is to have a perception of the practices and phases that have experienced the greatest changes. Additionally, it aims to identify a set of good practices that can be adopted by software engineering companies.

This study uses a qualitative methodology through four case studies involving Portuguese software engineering companies. Two of these companies are small and medium enterprises (SMEs) while the other remaining two are micro-companies. The thematic analysis is adopted to identify patterns in the performed interviews.

The findings indicate that significant changes have occurred at all stages of software development. In particular, the initial stages of identifying requirements and modeling processes were the stages that experienced the greatest changes. On the opposite, the technical development phase has not noticeably changed but, nevertheless, it is necessary to look at the importance of training software developers for GDPR rules and practices.

Two relevant limitations were identified as follows: only four case studies involving micro-companies and SMEs were considered, and only the traditional software development methodology was considered. The use of agile methodologies was not explored in this study and the findings can only be mainly applied to the waterfall model.

This study offers mainly practical contributions by identifying a set of challenges that are posed to software engineering companies by the implementation of GDPR. Through their knowledge, it is expected to help these companies to better prepare themselves and anticipate the challenges they will necessarily face.

When a unit of DEC establishes a strategic alliance in Europe with key customer ITT to combat a competitor, the venture proves difficult to manage.

The learning outcomes of this study include: recognizing the strategic inflexion points and related business and strategic perspectives in the life of an organization; understanding sources of sustained competitive advantage and connect it with resource-based view for internal analysis; applying dynamic capability theory to identify capabilities that help an IT company stay relevant in an IT sector characterized by VUCA (an acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) environment; analyzing the multi-dimensional and multi-contextual challenge an organization faces, or is likely to face, in the foreseeable future and the possible ways it addresses or should address them; evaluating strategies adopted at various points of an organization’s journey for their effectiveness; and helping a company co-create value for its customers.

This case of Nitor Infotech Private Limited (Nitor), a mid-sized software product outsourcing company, outlines its decade-long journey, highlighting its achievements. While the company has consistently grown by leveraging its expertise in software product engineering and its domain knowledge in the healthcare segment, it entered into a stage of its life cycle where it had to develop a long-term strategy to effectively compete in the product engineering market. Nitor’s strategy was built around product engineering and outsourced product development. The two major choices for a software company were either to develop its own product and thereby own the intellectual property (IP) or to develop modules which would be part of a product that would be owned by a client. In the latter case, the IP would be held by the client. So far Nitor chose to follow the second option by developing components for its client’s products. Although this strategy allowed it to develop expertise in a particular domain, and serve different customers in a particular market, the chances of a competitor attacking its position was high. On the other hand, if it developed its own product, it can create its own brand name and can sell packaged software to several different customers. However, the challenge with the latter is that the cost of marketing could be very high. The choice for the company in the future is to decide on selecting a specific strategy to expand its international business.

This case is appropriate for an undergraduate and postgraduate management course in the area of strategic management. The level of difficulty can be from medium to high depending on the learning level. Knowledge of management fundamentals is not a prerequisite but is desirable for case analysis.

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CSS 11: Strategy

Most of the studies carried out on human factor in software development concentrate primarily on personality traits. However, soft skills which largely help in determining personality traits have been given comparatively little attention by researchers. The purpose of this paper is to find out whether employers' soft skills requirements, as advertised in job postings, within different roles of software development, are similar across different cultures.

The authors review the literature relating to soft skills before describing a study based on 500 job advertisements posted on well‐known recruitment sites from a range of geographical locations, including North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. The study makes use of nine defined soft skills to assess the level of demand for each of these skills related to individual job roles within the software industry.

It was found that in the cases of designer, programmer and tester, substantial similarity exists for the requirements of soft skills, whereas only in the case of system analyst is dissimilarity present across different cultures. It was concluded that cultural difference does not have a major impact on the choice of soft skills requirements in hiring new employee in the case of the software development profession.

Specific studies concerning soft skills and software development have been sporadic and often incidental, which highlights the originality of this work. Moreover, no concrete work has been reported in the area of soft skills and their demand as a part of job requirement sets in diverse cultures, which increases the value of this paper.