Brian Fitzgerald

University of Limerick | UL · LERO - The Irish Software Research Centre

Agile development methods have become a standard in the software industry, including in large-scale projects. These methods share a set of underlying assumptions that distinguish them from more traditional plan-driven approaches. In this paper we adopt Alvesson and Sandberg's problematization approach to challenge three key assumptions that are pre...

Agile systems, like the Kanban and Scrum frameworks, are built on assumptions of sustainability and stability, however, there is little empirical evidence on whether such systems are stable in practice or not. Therefore, in this study we aim to inspect the stability of Agile systems by leveraging the concept of stability described in Queueing Theor...

We describe a comprehensive InnerSource incentivization program implemented at Huawei that has had impressive early results, leading to significant increases in the number of InnerSource projects, participants, departments, and lines of code cont.

p>Given the success of the open source phenomenon, it is not surprising that many organizations are seeking to emulate this success by adopting open source practices internally in what is termed InnerSource. However, while open source development and InnerSource are similar in some aspects, they differ significantly on others, and thus need to be i...

Given the success of the open source phenomenon, it is not surprising that many organizations are seeking to emulate this success by adopting open source practices internally in what is termed InnerSource. However, while open source development and InnerSource are similar in some aspects, they differ significantly on others, and thus need to be imp...

Given the success of the open source phenomenon, it is not surprising that many organizations are seeking to emulate this success by adopting open source practices internally in what is termed InnerSource. However, open source development and InnerSource operate from fundamentally different foundations and thus need to be incentivized differently....

Given the success of the open source phenomenon, it is not surprising that many organizations are seeking to emulate this success by adopting open source practices internally in what is termed InnerSource. However, open source development and InnerSource operate from fundamentally different foundations and thus need to be incentivized differently....

Objective This study aims to gather public opinion on the Irish “COVID Tracker” digital contact tracing (DCT) App, with particular focus on App usage, usability, usefulness, technological issues encountered, and potential changes to the App. Methods A 35-item online questionnaire was deployed for 10 days in October 2020, 3 months after the launch...

Open source software (OSS) is increasingly being developed by hybrid teams that consist of a mix of company employees and volunteer developers. While hybrid OSS teams are becoming more prevalent, they also face unique challenges due to the involvement of different constituents. To address those challenges, this paper develops and validates a new or...

Information systems development (ISD) has been a fundamental topic in MISQ from its first volume (Juergens 1977, Kling 1977). 1 Focus of the Research Curation An early challenge for us in preparing this curation was that ISD was not defined precisely in any of the MISQ articles we reviewed, despite early recommendations to do so (Moore 1979, p. 3...

Bitcoin introduced delegation of control over a monetary system from a select few to all who participate in that system. This delegation is known as the decentralization of controlling power and is a powerful security mechanism for the ecosystem. After the introduction of Bitcoin, the field of cryptocurrency has seen widespread attention from indus...

Background: Digital contact tracing apps have the potential to augment contact tracing systems and disrupt COVID-19 transmission by rapidly identifying secondary cases prior to the onset of infectiousness and linking them into a system of quarantine, testing, and health care worker case management. The international experience of digital contact tr...

BACKGROUND The silent transmission of COVID-19 has led to an exponential growth of fatal infections. With over 3 million deaths world-wide, the need to control and stem transmission has never been more critical. New COVID-19 vaccines offer hope. However, administration timelines, long-term protection, and effectiveness against variants are still un...

BACKGROUND Novel software applications (“Apps”) that can potentially simplify the laborious work of manual contact tracing during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are a tempting prospect. Given this potential, many countries have designed, developed and deployed Apps before their efficacy has been established. The Irish health service launched the “CO...

Background Digital Contact Tracing is seen as a key tool in reducing the propagation of Covid-19. But it requires high uptake and continued participation across the population to be effective. To achieve sufficient uptake/participation, health authorities should address, and thus be aware of, user concerns. Aim This work manually analyzes user rev...

BACKGROUND Digital contact tracing apps (DCTAs) have the potential to augment contact tracing systems and disrupt Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) transmission. Despite many countries deploying DCTAs, few have disrupted COVID-19 transmission sufficiently to avoid the most restrictive social distancing measures. OBJECTIVE Our aim was to describe and pro...

We need to built software rapidly and with a high quality. These goals seem to be contradictory, but actually, implementing automation in build and deployment procedures as well as quality analysis can improve both the development pace and the resulting quality at the same time. Rapid Continuous Software Engineering describes novel software enginee...

Contact Tracing (CT) is seen as a key tool in reducing the propagation of viruses, such as Covid-19. Given near ubiquitous societal usage of mobile devices, governments globally are choosing to augment manual CT with CT applications (CTAs) on smart phones. While a plethora of solutions have been spawned, their overall effectiveness is based on majo...

Digital Contact Tracing (DCT) is seen as a key tool in reducing the propagation of viruses such as Covid-19, but it requires uptake and participation in the technology across a large proportion of the population to be effective. While we observe the pervasive uptake of mobile device usage across our society, the installation and usage of contact tra...

Background: Contact tracing remains a critical part of controlling COVID-19 spread. Many countries have developed novel software applications (Apps) in an effort to augment traditional contact tracing methods. Aim: Conduct a national survey of the Irish population to examine barriers and levers to the use of a contact tracing App. Methods: Adu...

Bitcoin introduced delegation of control over a monetary system from a select few to all who participate in that system. This delegation is known as the decentralization of controlling power and is a powerful security mechanism for the ecosystem. After the introduction of Bitcoin, the field of cryptocurrency has seen widespread attention from indus...

This chapter presents a holistic overview of software engineering research strategies. It identifies the two main modes of research within the software engineering research field, namely knowledge-seeking and solution-seeking research—the Design Science model corresponding well with the latter. We present the ABC framework for research strategies a...

Although agile software development approaches have become increasingly prevalent, many organizations, have found they were not able to achieve a more frequent release cadence, largely due to different departmental functions operating in silos. In an effort to remove these silos, companies have moved towards DevOps. As digitalization continues, com...

Background: Contact tracing remains a critical part of controlling the spread of COVID-19. Many countries have developed novel software applications (Apps) in an effort to augment traditional contact tracing methods. Aim: To conduct a national survey of the Irish population to examine barriers and levers to the use of a contact tracing App. Methods...

We draw on the concept of episodic volunteering (EV) from the general volunteering literature to identify practices for managing EV in free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) communities. Infrequent but ongoing participation is widespread, but the practices that community managers are using to manage EV, and their concerns about EV, have not been p...

Agile development methods and DevOps require adaptation during implementation to meet the needs of a constantly changing software development environment. The emergence of knowledge-sharing practices for large-scale DevOps has not been the subject of much research. Our in-depth case study, comprising 106 interviews at a large multinational company...

The rapid pace with which software needs to be built, together with the increasing need to evaluate changes for end users both quantitatively and qualitatively calls for novel software engineering approaches that focus on short release cycles, continuous deployment and delivery, experiment-driven feature development, feedback from users, and rapid...

The rapid pace with which software needs to be built, together with the increasing need to evaluate changes for end users both quantitatively and qualitatively calls for novel software engineering approaches that focus on short release cycles, continuous deployment and delivery, experiment-driven feature development, feedback from users, and rapid...

Successful Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects incorporate both habitual and infrequent, or episodic, contributors. Using the concept of episodic volunteering (EV) from the general volunteering literature, we derive a model consisting of five key constructs that we hypothesize affect episodic volunteers’ retention in FLOSS communit...

Free/libre open source software (FLOSS) ecosystems such as Linux have had a tremendous impact on computing and society and have captured the attention of businesses, researchers, and policy makers. Research on FLOSS has been ongoing for almost two decades. From an economic perspective, the most common topics involve motivation and organization. As...

Agile development approaches have become the norm for almost all software development now. While agile approaches can deliver more frequent releases of working software, it quickly became apparent in many organisations that they were not able to leverage these frequent releases due to the disconnect between the development and operations functions,...

Full text available here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8477174 Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities are composed, in part, of volunteers, many of whom contribute infrequently. However, these infrequent volunteers contribute to the sustainability of FLOSS projects, and should ideally be encouraged to continue participatin...

Although only about 50 years old, the software domain has already endured one well‐documented crisis, which was identified early in its evolution in the 1960s. Simply summarized, the initial software crisis – Software Crisis 1.0 as I term it here – referred to the fact that software took longer to develop and cost more than estimated, and did not w...

A variety of research methods and techniques are available to SE researchers, and while several overviews exist, there is neither consistency in the research methods covered nor in the terminology used. Furthermore, research is sometimes critically reviewed for characteristics inherent to the methods. We adopt a taxonomy from the social sciences, t...

Open Access: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8119867/ Crowdsourcing is emerging as an alternative outsourcing strategy which is gaining increasing attention in the software engineering community. However, crowdsourcing software development involves complex tasks which differ significantly from the micro-tasks that can be found on crowdsourcing...

The Open Source movement is several decades old, but it wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that major companies entered the game. Traditional business wisdom had suggested that source code, which was seen as a “crown jewel” of a software company represented valuable intellectual property that should remain closed to maximize profit.

Defining a transformation journey is an important step in the transformation process. In this chapter we’ll show how to setup a workshop to identify the steps that an organization can take to embark on a software scaling transformation.

Scaling software development is a complex enterprise that can be organized in a number of ways. Since the early days of computing, hundreds, if not thousands of software development methods have been proposed.

Erratum to: N.L. Russo et al.(Eds.) Realigning Research and Practice in Information Systems Development DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35489-7

Grounded Theory (GT) has proved an extremely useful research approach in several fields including medical sociology, nursing, education and management theory. However, GT is a complex method based on an inductive paradigm that is fundamentally different from the traditional hypothetico-deductive research model. As there are at least three variants...

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has come to play a critical role in the global software industry. Organizations are widely adopting FOSS and interacting with open source communities, and hence organizations have a considerable interest in seeing these communities flourishing. Very little research has focused on the tools used to develop that s...

The debate between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ research approaches continues in the IS field, but with little prospect of resolution. The debate is typically characterized by tendentious arguments as advocates from each approach offer a somewhat one-sided condemnation of the counterpart from the inimical research tradition. This paper begins by relating two...

Inner source, the adoption and tailoring of Open Source development practices inside organizations, is a topic of increasing interest. While Inner Source offers a number of benefits, in our experience many practitioners are unclear as to what Inner Source is, and what steps to take towards adoption. In this article we present a tutorial in which we...

Software outsourcing has been the subject of much research in the past 25 years, largely because of potential cost savings envisaged through lower labour costs, ‘follow-the-sun’ development, access to skilled developers, and proximity to new markets. In recent years, the success of the open source phenomenon has inspired a number of new forms of so...

Empirical research studies are the principal mechanism through which the software engineering research community study and learn from software engineering practice. The focus on empirical studies has increased significantly in the past decade, more or less coinciding with the emergence of evidence- based software engineering, an idea that was propo...

This SpringerBrief discusses multiple forms of open-source-inspired outsourcing: opensourcing, innersourcing and crowdsourcing. It uses a framework-based comparison to explain the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. By pointing out characteristics along with benefits and pitfalls of each approach, the authors provide nuanced and research-bas...

Traditional release strategies have a number of associated problems, which can be overcome by time-based release management. We present findings from interviews with key members of seven prominent volunteer-based open source projects, all of which have adopted a time-based release strategy. We discuss the importance of release planning, the numerou...

In 1957, the eminent computer scientist, Edsger W. Dijkstra, sought to record his profession as “Computer Programmer” on his marriage certificate. The Dutch authorities, although probably more progressive than most, refused on the grounds that there was no such profession. Ironically, just a decade later, the term “software crisis” had been coined,...

The previous three chapters presented different forms of software outsourcing to an unknown workforce—opensourcing, innersourcing and crowdsourcing. These sourcing strategies all rely on a workforce that is not fully known in advance, unlike conventional software projects where teams are formed before a project is started. Furthermore, there are va...

In this chapter we discuss and illustrate opensourcing with case studies at IONA Technologies, Philips Healthcare and Telefonica. The chapter draws on the study reported by Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald (2008) and uses the set of company and community cues derived in that study (in the original publication, these were referred to as obligations). In the...

In this chapter we investigate the crowdsourcing phenomenon through a case study of a multinational company who embarked on a significant crowdsourcing software development initiative. Most studies aim to explain crowdsourcing by describing successful cases (e.g., Brabham 2008); as a result, there has been little attention to the challenges that ma...

The previous chapter discussed opensourcing, whereby the development and maintenance of a software product is “outsourced” to an open source community. As noted above, open source communities have developed a number of highly successful software products despite their seeming defiance of traditional software engineering wisdom. Starting in the late...

Outsourcing of the software development activity has been on the increase in recent years according to both US and European reports. However, in many cases outsourcing of software development, often referred to as global software engineering, has not delivered on its promise (e.g. Nakatsu and Iacovou 2009; Tiwana and Keil 2009; Ó Conchúir et al. 20...

It is almost 30 years since Osterweil’s controversial but insightful observation that software processes could be considered as software too. In the current era of continuous delivery, DevOps, and the increasing proliferation of cyber-physical social systems in Cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) contexts, infrastructure definitions and implementati...

A number of organizations have adopted Open Source Software (OSS) development practices to support or augment their software development processes, a phenomenon frequently referred to as Inner Source. How- ever the adoption of Inner Source is not a straightforward issue. Many organizations are struggling with the question of whether Inner Source is...

There has been a growing interest in the role of theory within Software Engineering (SE) research. For several decades, researchers within the SE research community have argued that, to become a ‘real’ engineering science, SE needs to develop stronger theoretical foundations. However, so far, the role of theory is neither fully appreciated nor well...

Crowdsourcing is an emerging topic within software engineering research. This report presents the protocol for our case study of crowdsourcing at a multinational company. The findings of the case study are presented in a paper in the proceedings of the 36 th International Conference on Software Engineering (2014) (see ref. [ 37 ]). This protocol pr...

Microblogging is a popular form of social media that has quickly permeated both enterprise and open source communities. However, exactly how open source communities can leverage microblogging isn't yet well understood. The authors investigate how Drupal's open source community uses Twitter, a household name in microblogging. Their analysis of group...

As the Free and Open Source (FOSS) concept has matured, its commercial significance has also increased, and issues such as quality and sustainability have moved to the fore. In this study, the authors focus on time-based release management in large volunteer FOSS projects, and reveal how they address quality and sustainability issues. They discuss...

Throughout its short history, software development has been characterized by harmful disconnects between important activities e.g., planning, development and implementation. The problem is further exacerbated by the episodic and infrequent performance of activities such as planning, testing, integration and releases. Several emerging phenomena refl...

Crowdsourcing is an emerging form of ‘outsourcing’ software development. While there has been considerable research in the area of crowdsourcing in general, very little research has focused specifically on how crowdsourcing works in a software development context, and as far as we know, there have been no published studies of crowdsourcing software...

Crowdsourcing is an emerging and promising approach which involves delegating a variety of tasks to an unknown workforce—the crowd. Crowdsourcing has been applied quite successfully in various contexts from basic tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk to solving complex industry problems, e.g. InnoCentive. Companies are increasingly using crowdsourcing to...

Many professions evolve from their origins as a creative craft process to a more product-centered industrial process. Software development is on such an evolutionary trajectory. A major step in this evolution is the progression from ad hoc to more rigorous evidence-based decision-making in software development project management. This paper extends...

Agile development techniques are becoming increasingly popular in the generic software development industry as they appear to offer solutions to the problems associated with following a plan-driven Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). However, agile methods may not be suited to all industries or organisations. For agile methods to succeed, an or...

There has been a growing interest in the role of theory within Software Engineering (SE) research. For several decades, researchers within the SE research community have argued that, to become a real engineering science, SE needs to develop stronger theoretical foundations. A few authors have proposed guidelines for constructing theories, building...

Agile development methods are growing in popu-larity with a recent survey reporting that more than 80% of organizations now following an agile approach. Agile methods were seen initially as best suited to small, co-located teams developing non-critical systems. The first two constraining char-acteristics (small and co-located teams) have been addre...