Overview

The sustainable development of a software product depends on a number of groups working together to achieve a common goal. However, each of the groups interacts with the product in different ways, and can have conflicting aims and objectives. For example, developers trying to correct issues of the architecture that will impact the product in future releases, can be stopped by a pro ject manager who is charged with delivering a release on time and within budget. While the functional requirements of a software product are usually documented, there are a number of other investments in software development that are not always as explicitly agreed upon but are still essential to a product’s long-term success. The ma jor investment types include software product quality – a main control variables in software development, and intellectual capital (IC) – being the key input and tool used in software development.

As management requires measurement, it is necessary understand the priorities placed on investment options by the various groups involved in the development of a software product. The objective of this thesis is to develop a method capable of both determining the priorities of different groups, and the level of alignment between these groups in terms of their priorities.

Evolving the method from a study into the values used to select requirements  for a release of software, Ericsson continued development of a methodology to determine the values applied to requirements selection and prioritisation, to now determine and compare the priorities of different groups for software product quality, and IC. The method elicited the required information from a series of case studies to build up a picture of the priorities placed on ma jor investment options and constraints – features, quality, IC, time and cost. The results highlighted strengths, and areas for improvement – through the identification of differing priorities and ambiguities in management of different aspects studied.

In conducting this research systematic biases in the selection of requirements appears to be occurring, adding an ob jective to understand how bias impacts decision making in a requirements engineering context.

This thesis provides a method that determines the priorities on the level of investment on different options in the development of software products. It is concluded that people involved in the development of software need to be aligned on issues of software product quality as these priorities set expectations. The same was not found true for issues of IC, where groups can complete tasks without negatively impacting others, as long as the organisation works effectively as a single entity. On the issue of biases in the prioritisation of these aspects, prospect theory is found to apply to requirements selection in an academic experiment – suggesting people will prefer functionality over software product quality, and to meet the known requirements of customers over predicting general market requirements.

Information

Thesis: Download (PDF)

Defence: 5 June 2009 at 13.15, Blekinge Institute of Technology - Ronneby Campus

Opponent: Martin Höst, LTH

Key Dates

Lock-in opponent: 1 February – 1 April 2009 (2-4 months in advance)

Compile thesis: 1 March – 20 April 2009 (3-4 weeks full time work)

Approval to publish: 30 April 2009

Submit to publisher: 20-25 April 2009 (5-6 weeks before) - 30 April 2009

Licentiate defence: Friday, 5 June 2009 at 13.15

Thesis Chapters

The following chapters and papers will make up my licentiate thesis. The papers will be reformatted for consistency in the thesis, and the titles will reflect those on this page.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Status: Complete

Download: Thesis (PDF)

Chaper 2 | Paper 1: Understanding Software Product Requirements Selection

Status: Complete

Published as Sebastian Barney, Aybüke Aurum, Claes Wohlin, "A Product Management Challenge: Creating Software Product Value Through Requirements Selection", Journal of System Architecture 2008, vol. 54, no.6, pp. 576-593, June 2008

Download: Paper (PDF) | Interview Questions (PDF) | Questionnaire (PDF)

Chaper 3 | Paper 2: Balancing Software Product Qualities

Status: Complete

Extended version of Sebastian Barney, Claes Wohlin, Software Product Quality: Organisational Alignment of Priority and Management, to be published in Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP), Vancouver, Canada, 16-17 May 2009

Download: Paper (PDF) | Definitions (PDF) | Questionnaire (XLT)

Chapter 4 | Paper 3: Balancing Software Product Quality and Intellectual Capital

Status: Complete

Submitted as Sebastian Barney, Claes Wohlin, Aybüke Aurum, "Balancing Software Product Investments", submitted to International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2009), Florida, USA, October 2009

Download: Paper (PDF) | Definitions (PDF) | Questionnaire (XLT)

Chapter 5 | Paper 4: Attitudes to Value and Risk in Requirement Selection

Status: Complete

Published as Nina Fogelström, Sebatian Barney, Aybüke Aurum, Anders Hederstierna, "When Product Managers Gamble with  Requirements: Attitudes to Value and Risk", to be published in the Proceedings of the 15th International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ), pp. 1-15, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 8-9 June 2009

Download: Paper (PDF)

Papers Not Included in Thesis

The following papers will be ready in time for inclusion in my thesis, but have been placed outside the scope of the final document.

1. Sebastian Barney, Aybüke Aurum, Claes Wohlin, "Quest for a  Silver Bullet: Creating Software Product Value Through Requirements Selection", EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced  Applications (SEAA), Cavtat, Croatia, pp. 274–281, August 2006 [DOI]
2. Sebastian Barney, Ganglan Hu, Aybüke Aururm, Claes Wohlin, "Creating Software Product Value in China", IEEE Software, vol. 26, no. 4, July/August 2009 [PDF]
3. Sebastian Barney, Aybüke Aurum, Claes Wohlin, "Balancing IC Concerns in Software Companies", submitted to EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced  Applications (SEAA), Patras, Greece, August 2006 [PDF]