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Requirements Engineering

The Role of Site Visits in Software Engineering Teams

A large number of Software Engineering teams are virtual, which are characterised by various types of distances such geographical, culture, temporal, and knowledge. Such distances can cause a number of small and big challenges that lead sub-optimal development teams or event project failures. Software engineering researchers and practitioners have been researching and debating the cost and benefits of site visits for enabling software development teams to spend time together in order to get to know each other professionally and personally. It is argued that such visits result in establishing and growing trust that is important for successful teams. However, software development managers always find it hard to make a strong enough case for investing such visits. We have carried out a longitudinal case study focused on the socio-ethnical dynamics and potential benefits of site visits in terms of enhanced trust and cooperation among team members who came from entirely different regions, culture, region, and socio-economic background. Our study has found very useful insights for software development managers and researchers. We are sharing the details of our study through the pre-print copy of our paper, whose abstract is provided here.

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Knowledge Sharing in Globally Distributed Teams

Globally distributed software engineering has become a norm of getting software developed. Whilst there are several potential benefits of getting software teams working around the clock while being located around the World – so-called follow the sun strategy -, there are several challenges in making such teams successfully work together. Communication, coordination, and collaboration are some of the key areas of challenges of global software development – the challenges in these areas either result from or lead to challenges of sharing knowledge – contextual, technical, personal.  Software engineering researchers and practitioners always seem to be interested in this area as the challenges of knowledge sharing usually lead to project failure and teaming problems.  We are recently published an extensive literature review on knowledge sharing challenges and solutions in global software development. Here is the pre-print copy of our paper, whose abstract is provided below for the interested readers.

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A New Approach to Identifying Security Requirements

We are delighted to announce that our ongoing collaboration with researchers from Lancaster University and University of Leicester has resulted in an approach to eliciting security requirements. The approach has been published in a recently accepted paper in the premier software engineering conference, the International Conference on Software Engineering to be organised in Austin, USA in 2016. The title and abstract of the accepted paper are: Discovering “Unknown Known” Security Requirements:Read More »A New Approach to Identifying Security Requirements

Australasian Software Engineering Conference Coming to Adelaide

After several months of deliberations and discussions, I’m glad to announce that finally Australasian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC) will be coming to Adelaide in late September this year; the exact dates are September 28 to October 1 2015. ASWEC will be coming to Adelaide after almost 18 years and we are really looking forward to hosting. A ASWEC2015 flyer can be downed and distributed. We have secured excellent keynote speakers and a series of invited speakers from industry and academia. We plan on building a non-conventioal and interesting program, which will not be heavily dependant upon scientific research findings; rather we are going to hugely engage industry and government agencies, particular local, educators at high schools and tertiary educational institutes, and several special interests groups.Read More »Australasian Software Engineering Conference Coming to Adelaide

Process Support for Migrating to Clouds

I have been invited to give a talk at MESOCA 2013 (the 7th IEEE International Symposium on the Maintenance and Evolution of Service-Oriented and Cloud-Based Systems, which will be collocated with the 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2013). I am very much looking forward to the symposium as I expect to meet and listen to several researchers and practitioners in the area of software maintenance and evolution. For my talk, I am going to share our experiences and observations about providing process support for migrating to cloud computing. This talk is based on our ongoing work in the area of process support for migrating to cloud computing to help companies ease the pain of migration. Read More »Process Support for Migrating to Clouds