3 october 2001wscacchi@uci.edu1 understanding and (re)designing software development processes walt...

3 October 2001 wscacchi@uci.edu 1

Understanding and (Re)Designing Software Development Processes

Walt ScacchiInstitute for Software Research

University of California, Irvine

Irvine, CA 92697-3425 USA

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/Presentations/JPL-Process-Oct01.ppt

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Recurring problems

• What is the best way to organize software development project?

• How to speed up development, reduce costs and improve software quality?

• How to achieve the quickest development effort, lowest effective development cost, and best available product quality?

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Possible solutions

• Attain and improve maturity of software development capabilities (image)

• Get best people to practice standards-based development process supported by IDEs

• (Re)Design your software production architecture (SPA) to optimize use of development resources, processes, and people.

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Goals

• Present an approach for how to optimize software production

• Identify key concepts, techniques, and tools that enable better optimization

• Describe optimization transformations from business process redesign studies

• Describe opportunity areas for exploitation and use

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Definitions and Differences

• Software production: enterprise processes and resources that produce software

• Production strategies: business strategies guiding overall approach to building software

• Production architecture: configuration of enterprise capabilities to enact strategies

• Optimizing production: minimizing enterprise configuration to maximize strategic options

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(Re)designing software production• What first: to-be goal vs. as-is mess?

– If you don’t know where you are, any road will do (proverb)

– Observation: people at work cannot describe the processes they do with high fidelity (tacit knowledge)

– Redesign necessitates understanding as-is, to-be, and here-to-there

• Creating high-performance work groups– Empowerment, participation, incentivization (resource

sovereignty), and recognition

W. Scacchi, Redesigning Contracted Service Procurement for Internet-based Electronic Commerce: A Case Study, J. Information Technology and Management, 2(3), 313-334, 2001.

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Software Production Strategies

• Reduce costs• Reduce cycle time • Improve cash flow• Customer satisfaction• Increase sales• Improve customer

service

• Increase productivity• Open new markets• Open new “channels”• Be innovation leader• Increase market share• Enable just-in-time

service delivery

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Software Production Architecture• A composite model that interrelates

– software system architecture– software process architecture– development organization architecture– network infrastructure and development

tools/environment configuration – documentation architecture– customer-support knowledge base architecture

P. Mi and W. Scacchi, A Meta-Model for Formulating Knowledge-Based Models of Software Development, Decision Support Systems, 17(4):313-330, 1996.

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Optimizing Software Production

• Strategies provide global constraints or opportunities for optimizing software production

• Constraints and opportunities realized in software production enterprise

• Constraints and opportunities are distributed across the software production architecture

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Optimizing Software Production

• Optimization must address composite architecture of software production

• Local optimization of any component architecture does not guarantee global optimality of software production

• Diagnostic analyses and transformation heuristics applied to composite architectural models lead to optimization opportunities

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Optimizing Software Production

• Transformation heuristics classified taxonomically

• Taxonomy classifies domain-independent and domain-specific hueristics

• DI transformations applied in any software production setting

• DS transformations applied to specific component architectures

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Optimizing Software Production

• DI transformation classes (sample):– Job scope– Worker empowerment– Organization design– Workflow streamlining– Information technology (IT)

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Research grant justification and approval process at Office of Naval Research (c. 1995)

W. Scacchi and J. Noll, Process-Driven Intranets: Life Cycle Support for Process Reengineering IEEE Internet Computing, 1(5):42-49, 1997.

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Optimizing Software Production

• IT transformation sub-classes (sample):– Extend IT-based support to manual process steps – Extend IT-based communication facilities to

encourage information sharing activities – Extend IT-based automation to incorporate new

kinds of application packages – Extend IT-based integration to interconnect and

interrelate existing "islands of automation"

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As-is vs. to-be process

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Redesign/Optimization Results

• Reduction in procurement process cycle times of 20X, annual operational savings of $10-15M.– Via transformation and realignment of information

systems, business processes, corporate strategy, and work practices in a 1-2 year time frame.

– Participatory design, development and refinement of computational models of new work processes, resource configurations and work practices, together as an organizational system.

W. Scacchi, Redesigning Contracted Service Procurement for Internet-Based Electronic Commerce: A Case Study, Information Technology and Management, 2(3):313-334, 2001.

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Tools and Techniques

• Software process redesign case web

• Knowledge web for software production

• Process-driven intranets

• Organizational transformation

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Case study: Software development teamwork

• Comparative analysis of software specification teamwork (in complex setting)– Five teams, 5-7 members, two-week (part-time)

process that incorporates planning, formal notation, automated tool use, reusable assets, documentation tasks, and team shared responsibility.

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What to Understand• Work Structures and Shifts: Resource

arrangements, historical circumstances, division of labor and expertise, etc.

• Work Processes: Routine, habitual or emergent patterns of how work flows among people through/onto work structures

• Work Practices: Behavioral discourse and social dynamics enacted through work processes

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What to Understand

• Structures are domain independent constructs– Prescriptive/descriptive abstractions

• Processes are classes of workflow– Descriptive and derived – Prescriptive and composed

• Practices are instances– Descriptive, historic and situated

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Comparative analysis of software specification teamwork

– Six work structure types observed: Negotiated, Integrated, Replicated, Delegated, Prediscriminated and Separated

– Three structural shift types observed: • anticipated ->,

• unanticipated -->>,

• role shift within work structure +.

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Work structures and shifts (data)Team ID T1 T2 T3 T4 T5Team Size 6 7 7 7 5Reusable Exemplar no yes yes yes yes

PROCESSA. Pre-planning task N->R->I N->R->I N->R->I N->R->I N->R->I

B. Planning task N N N N N c. I I I I -> S I -> Sd. I I+ I S Se. P (D,I,I) P (D,I,I) P (D,I,I) P (D,S->I,I) P (D,D,I)f. D D D D Dg. R R R D Dh. D I I D D

C. Develop preliminary I -->> I+ I+ I+ -> S+ I -> S+(informal) specification N -->>

R -->> I

D. Develop formal I+ I+ I+ S+ -->> S+(processable) spec. N -->>E. Document N -->> D P+ P+ N -->> P(D,D,I)write-up P(D,S->I,D)F. Documentation D -->> D+ D+ D+ D+integration N -->> I

G. Document review R R R N -->> R D

H. Prepare for D -->> I+ N -->> I+ N -->> I+ D+Delivery N -->> I

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Findings

• Highest (lowest) quality product (measured by automated tools): T1 (T5)

• Highest (lowest) productivity (self reported time expended): T5 (T1)

• Note the coincidental relationship

• Effectiveness of planning, automated tool use, asset reuse not clearly associated with high(low) quality or high(low) productivity

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Findings

• Teams falling primarily into Negotiative and Integrative structures had higher quality

• Teams falling primarily into Delegative, Pre-discriminative or Separative structures had higher productivity

• Computer supported work environments must account for teamwork structures as a usage parameter.

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Tools and Techniques

• Software process redesign case web

• Knowledge web for software production:– Software production ontology– Taxonomy for as-is diagnosis, redesign heuristics– Best practices and lessons learned cross-linked

• Process-driven intranets

• Organizational transformation

W. Scacchi and A. Valente, Developing a Knowledge Web for Business Process Redesign, Presented at the 1999 Knowledge Acquisition Workshop, Banff, Canada, October 1999.

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Current field study

• Understanding open source software practices and processes in different domains– Academic research vs. Commercial development

• Deep Space Astronomy, Software Architecture

• Internet infrastructure, Networked computer games

• To produce and compare case studies using narrative, hypertext, and computational renderings.

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Tools and Techniques

• Software process redesign case web

• Knowledge web for software production:

• Process-driven intranets: – Model, prototype, and enact software production

architectures

• Organizational transformation

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Process-driven intranets

• Enable rapid configuration of virtual enterprises (VEs) across multiple organizational domains

• Virtual enterprises for wide-area software development have been demonstrated

• Software production in VEs supported and enacted via process navigation (“process surfing”)

J. Noll and W. Scacchi, Supporting Software Development in Virtual Enterprises, Journal of Digital Information, 1(4), February 1999.

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Process-driven intranets

• Accommodate organizational autonomy and computer-supported cooperative work

• Accommodate heterogeneous repositories of development artifacts (source code, etc.)

• Accommodate use of local tools and development environments

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Process-driven intranets

Also see, J. Noll and W. Scacchi, Specifying Process-Oriented Hypertext for Organizational Computing, J. Network and Computer Applications, 24(1):39-61, 2001

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Process-driven intranets

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Tools and Techniques

• Software process redesign case web

• Knowledge web for software production

• Process-driven intranets

• Organizational transformation– What’s involved?– How long does it take?– How much bang for the buck?

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Organizational transformation

• Collaborative participation to understand as-is, to-be, and here-to-there SPAs within constraints and contexts.

• Timeframe: 6-18 months

• Baseline investment (ROI): – External: Invest $1 to realize $10 savings/gain.– Internal: Staff time, infrastructure usage, etc.

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Conclusions

• Software production can be optimized

• Optimizing software production is a strategic option/choice that can be realized

• Software production architectures and supporting technologies enable optimization

• Process improvement and production optimization are complementary efforts

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References• S. Bendifallah and W. Scacchi, Work Structures and Shifts: A Study in Software

Specification Teamwork, Proc. 11th. Intern. Conf. Software Engineering, Pittsburgh, PA, IEEE Press, 260-270, 1989.

• R. Conradi and A. Fuggetta. Software process improvement: what can be improved? Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Submitted for publication, 2001.

• W. Scacchi and P. Mi, Process Life Cycle Engineering: A Knowledge-Based Approach and Environment, Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management, 6:83-107, 1997.

• W. Scacchi, Understanding Software Process Redesign using Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation, Software Process--Improvement and Practice, 5(2/3), 183-195, 2000.

• J.S. Choi and W. Scacchi, Modeling and Simulating Software Acquisition Process Architectures, Journal of Systems and Software, to appear, 2001

• Available at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/publications.html

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