Jouni Markkula

University of Oulu · M3S Research Unit

Mature test automation is key for achieving software quality at speed. In this paper, we present a multivocal literature review with the objective to survey and synthesize the guidelines given in the literature for improving test automation maturity. We selected and reviewed 81 primary studies, consisting of 26 academic literature and 55 grey liter...

The popularity of continuous integration (CI) is increasing as a result of market pressure to release product features or updates frequently. The ability of CI to deliver quality at speed depends on reliable test automation. In this paper, we present an empirical study to observe the effect of test automation maturity (assessed by standard best pra...

The popularity of continuous integration (CI) is increasing as a result of market pressure to release product features or updates frequently. The ability of CI to deliver quality at speed depends on reliable test automation. In this paper, we present an empirical study to observe the effect of test automation maturity (assessed by standard best pra...

Mature test automation is key for achieving software quality at speed. In this paper, we present a multivocal literature review with the objective to survey and synthesize the guidelines given in the literature for improving test automation maturity. We selected and reviewed 81 primary studies, consisting of 26 academic literature and 55 grey liter...

Context Software startups develop innovative products through which they scale their business rapidly, and thus, provide value to the economy, including job generation. However, most startups fail within two years of their launch because of a poor problem-solution fit and negligence of the learning process during minimum viable product (MVP) develo...

Test automation is important in the software industry but self-assessment instruments for assessing its maturity are not sufficient. The two objectives of this study are to synthesize what an organization should focus to assess its test automation; develop a self-assessment instrument (a survey) for assessing test automation maturity and scientific...

Requirements volatility is a major issue in software development, causing problems such as higher defect density, project delays, and cost overruns. Software architecture that guides the overall vision of software product is one of the areas that is greatly affected by requirements volatility. Since critical architecture decisions are made based on...

Personal data is increasingly collected with the support of rapidly advancing information and communication technology, which raises privacy concerns among data subjects. In order to address these concerns and offer the full benefits of personal data-intensive services to the public, service providers need to understand how to evaluate privacy conc...

Human decision-making theories and formal models are increasingly used for developing advanced ICT-based intelligent systems and services. Decision filed theory (DFT) is one of the decision-making theories that has significant potential for practical applications in real-world decision-making situations. Successful empirical studied have shown that...

Efficient utilisation of new mobility data-based services and promotion of acceptance of data collection from vehicles and people demand an understanding of mobility data privacy concerns, associated with increasing use of tracking technologies, diverse data usages and complex data collection environments. Understanding privacy concerns enables imp...

We investigate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in a large and multi-national telecommunication company and discover needs and requirements for understanding, analysing and using KPIs from practitioner’s perspective. Utilising an action research approach, we identified the existing challenges with KPIs in a large-scale software-intensive systems d...

Technological development and increasing personal data collection and utilization raise the importance of understanding individuals’ privacy behavior. Privacy behavior denotes the willingness to disclose personal data for services utilizing these data. The literature presents various privacy behavior models (PBMs). However, the research is incohere...

Requirements volatility is a major issue in software (SW) development, causing problems such as project delays and cost overruns. Even though there is a considerable amount of research related to requirement volatility, the majority of it is inclined toward project management aspects. The relationship between SW architecture design and requirements...

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force in the European Union (EU) in May 2018 to meet current challenges related to personal data protection and to harmonise data protection across the EU. Although the GDPR is anticipated to benefit companies by offering consistency in data protection activities and liabilities across th...

Software companies that develop their products on a basis of service-oriented architecture (SOA) can expect various improvements as a result of choreography. Current choreography practices, however, are not yet used extensively in the embedded systems domain even though SOA is increasingly used in this domain. The objective of this study is to iden...

A software pattern describes the core of the solution to a problem that tends to (re-)occur in a particular environment. Such patterns are commonly used as a means to facilitate the creation of an architectural design satisfying the desired quality goals. In this chapter, the practical challenges of efficient usage of patterns in domain-specific so...

Choreography, as a service-oriented architecture-specific viewpoint , is increasingly present in the embedded systems domain. Existing languages for choreography modelling, however, are insufficiently expressive to capture the complexities that are typical in the embedded systems domain. To address this, a new language for choreography modelling wa...

Choreography, as a service-oriented architecture-specific viewpoint, is increasingly present in the embedded systems domain. Existing languages for choreography modelling, however, are insufficiently expressive to capture the complexities that are typical in the embedded systems domain. To address this, a new language for choreography modelling was...

Traditional portfolio management tools and methods are challenging for software companies that use agile and lean approaches, because of the complex pre-planning activities required. In this paper, traditional portfolio management tools and methods that have been conventionally used in industry and presented in literature are reviewed. Findings con...

Architecture decision making is considered one of the most challenging cognitive tasks in software development. The objective of this study is to explore the state of the practice of architecture decision making in software teams, including the role of the architect and the associated challenges. An exploratory case study was conducted in a large s...

Business ecosystems are a way of contextualizing the collaboration between organizations during the development of new business. Traditionally, business ecosystems are forming around one leader company, but they can also be formed with the support of public funding bringing together companies and research organizations to develop new technological...

Advances in technology and digitalisation have changed the ways services are created and offered to users. Successful new innovative services and service value co-creation are done in collaboration with organisations and actors in contexts such as business ecosystems. The research relating to service design and open innovation in business ecosystem...

Technology-based services are increasingly being developed in business ecosystems. Business ecosystems benefit companies by enabling shared goals and resources through collaboration, but a successful business ecosystem also requires internal management of knowledge. Strategic funding is currently being offered for the formation of new business ecos...

Software companies that develop embedded systems following the principles of service-oriented architecture can anticipate various benefits from choreography modelling. Current choreography modelling languages, however, have a limited applicability in embedded systems development since they are not expressive enough to capture all the choreography-r...

In the last decade, Kanban has been promoted as a means for bringing visibility to work while improving the software development flow, team communication and collaboration. However, little empirical evidence exists regarding Kanban use in the software industry. This paper aims to investigate the factors that users perceive to be important for Kanba...

In the last two decades, Agile and Lean approaches have gained wide acceptance in the software industry. In this realm, Kanban emerged in 2004 with a strong practitioner-driven support movement and today, Kanban is increasingly adopted to complement Scrum and other Agile methods. Kanban tends to focus on fast production, rapid and continual user fe...

To help establish a more scientific basis for security science, which will enable the development of fundamental theories and move the field from being primarily reactive to primarily proactive, it is important for research results to be reported in a scientifically rigorous manner. Such reporting will allow for the standard pillars of science, nam...

Software companies that develop embedded systems following the principles of service-oriented architecture can anticipate various benefits from choreography modelling. Current choreography modelling languages, however, have a limited applicability in embedded systems development since they are not expressive enough to capture all the choreography-r...

Software companies are increasingly moving to use Kanban after Scrum since Kanban claimed to offer improved project visibility, software quality, team motivation, communication and collaboration. However, empirical studies are needed to verify these effects and companies’ real motivation for the transition. In particular, underlying reasons leading...

Even though there is emerging literature on e-government, research focused on potential problems related to citizens’ adoption of e-government services in developing countries is still limited. As a developing country, e-government services in Pakistan have witnessed prolific advancements over the years. Since 2002, Pakistan has strategically adopt...

(Full text available will be after 20th November 2015) There is a growing interest about Kanban in software engineering due to its many advantages, such as, reduced lead-time and improved team communication. Kanban originates from Toyota manufacturing and in 2004, was introduced to software engineering where knowledge of it is limited. The objectiv...

Software architecture decision-making is critical to the success of a software system as software architecture sets the structure of the system, determines its qualities, and has far-reaching consequences throughout the system life cycle. The complex nature of the software development context and the importance of the problem has led the research c...

This document contains the definition of a rubric used to classify security research papers. First we define three dimensions used to classify each paper: a) what is being analyzed in the paper-the evaluation subject, b) whether the evaluation subject is new, meaning whether it was first proposed in this paper or not, and c) how the authors evaluat...

Requirements elicitation is one of the most important and challenging activities in software development projects. A variety of challenges related to requirements elicitation are reported in the literature, of which the lack of proper communication and knowledge transfer between software stakeholders are among the most important. Communication and...

Motivation in software engineering is a complex topic. Cultural background is reported to be one of the factors moderating software engineers' motivation and project outcome. The authors conducted a survey with 36 software engineers from Finland to explore 1) the relationship between team motivation and project outcome, 2) factors that motivate Fin...

Technology and software-based service development is increasingly important in business or innovation ecosystems. This paper describes an evolution of such an ecosystem as part of a four-year collaboration with several companies and a research organization. Research was conducted on the ecosystem's functions, from the perspective of managing its me...

There is a growing interest in applying Kanban in software development to reap the proclaimed benefits presented in the literature. The goal of this paper is to provide up-to-date knowledge of the current state of Kanban usage in software companies, regarding the motivation for using it as well as the benefits obtained and challenges faced in its a...

Software architecture designs are useful artifacts; however, their development and maintenance are considered challenging. To better understand the possible causes for these challenges, this article presents a case-study intended to discover and understand software architects’ challenges and to propose domain-specific models to address these challe...

Following the present open data policies, traffic data are collected and increasingly made openly available by different organizations. Yet, expanding use of mobile technologies with tracking possibilities provides means to collect precise and rich information about individual vehicles and persons in traffic. This personal driving data, combined wi...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors that enable end‐user adoption of e‐government services in Pakistan, where these facilities are at a rudimentary stage. Design/methodology/approach Following previous research on e‐government services adoption, this study employs the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAU...

Context: Successfully addressing stakeholder concerns that are related to software system development and operation is crucial to achieving development goals. The importance of using a systematic approach to addressing these concerns throughout the software development life cycle is growing as more and more systems are employed to handle critical t...

Previous studies suggest that motivation is a critical factor in developer productivity and project outcome, i.e., software project failures are significantly associated with low motivation of software teams. Surveys with software engineers also indicate that culture can affect software development team motivation through differences in developers'...

Industry needs graduates from universities having knowledge and skills to tackle the practical issues of real life software development. To facilitate software engineering students and fulfill industry need, the Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu, Finland, built a Software Factory laboratory (SWF) in 2012 based on Lean...

Even though there is emerging literature on e-government, research focused on potential problems related to citizens' adoption of e-government services in developing countries is still limited. As a developing country, e-government services in Pakistan have witnessed prolific advancements over the years. Since 2002, Pakistan has strategically adopt...

The software industry needs university graduates with up-to-date knowledge on software development approaches and the necessary knowledge and skills to tackle the practical issues of real-life software development. Various techniques are used in industry to provide a holistic view of projects and identify obstacles in software development as they o...

A software pattern describes the core of the solution to a problem that tends to (re-)occur in a particular environment. Such patterns are commonly used as a means to facilitate the creation of an architectural design satisfying the desired quality goals. In this chapter, the practical challenges of efficient usage of patterns in domain-specific so...

Domain-Specific Languages for service interaction modeling in the embedded systems domain are generally considered insufficiently expressive. To fully represent what is relevant for the developers, service interactions are commonly modeled from two viewpoints: orchestration, which is the individual, and choreography, which is the global viewpoint....

Using of Kanban in software development is an emerging topic. This systematic literature review was conducted in order to analyze the current trend of Kanban usage in software development and to identify the obtained benefits and involved challenges. The search strategy resulted in 492 papers, of which 19 were identified as primary studies relevant...

This exploratory empirical study has focused on open source software (OSS). Seven medium-sized OSS systems from the SourceForge repository were analysed. Over 100 internal quality attributes and programming practices were scrutinized by using two semi-automated source code analysis tools (FindBugs and SoftCalc). Many statistically significant relat...

Earlier empirical studies have demonstrated the interest that agile methods have generated in the software industry. Currently, lean approaches are increasingly adopted for complementing agile methods in software processes. With the goal of providing up-to-day results that can be used by organizations implementing or planning to implement agile and...

Agile software development has been widely accepted by the software industry as a means for improving flexibility and innovation capabilities. More recently, lean thinking has emerged as a new paradigm to make software development more efficient. In practice, quite often lean is seen as an evolution of agile when agile is not considered to be enoug...

E-government provides opportunities to deliver various services more effectively and better serve citizens. In developing countries, e-government initiatives provide services that have been previously inaccessible to their citizens. However, e-government initiatives in developing countries are still in their infancy and face a wide range of barrier...

In the current globalized business environment, companies face increasing collaboration challenges at different levels of operation. Economic factors, as well as advancements in technology, have led to the globalization of design and production, which are organized into distributed projects. Information management and communication system issues ar...

Insufficient knowledge and implementation barriers hinder the adaptation of e-learning in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Validated e-learning concepts can provide a roadmap to save company resources. The objective of this research was to study the transference of the e-learning concept developed in the university environment to an SME context...

Development of new advanced mobile ubiquitous multimedia services presents number of challenges which needs to be addressed in service platform design. We have been developing our Locawe platform for this goal in several research projects using systematic develop-evaluate design cycle as a research approach. During the development we have build an...

In recent literature there is still a lack of understanding how the reuse and cloning of software affects its quality. The focus of this study is to analyze the relationships between source code cloning and software quality for the case of open source software project forks (SPFs) as a kind of software reuse. In total 117 releases related to three...

In this paper, we offer an approach for performing an organization-wide earned value analysis by taking advantage of the hierarchical structure of the GQM+Strategies grid. The merger enables us to create an integrated hierarchy of business goals, value goals, and strategies for achieving those goals and to monitor and evaluate those goals at all le...

In the global software development environment, the companies face the challenges of collaboration. This is particularly challenging for software companies in rural areas, which are typically small companies with limited resources. Often their customers and partners are also geographically dispersed. These factors, in addition to geographical dista...

Service development in companies can have a new form when using social media as a communication interface. This communication can occur between company and its customers, but also the company’s internal communication using social media services can prove beneficial. In this paper, we review and analyze the use of social media as a means for company...

Location-based services (LBS) introduce serious privacy threats, which need to be addressed before the users and the service providers can get full benefit of these promising services. We addressed this challenge by reviewing and analysing privacy protection solutions proposed in the literature. Based on the analysis, we identified three general ap...

Nowadays the software industry is applying agile methods widely. However, there appears to be a lack of comprehensive guidelines and strategies addressing agile adoption. In addition, agile methods and practices often have to be tailored to be integrated into existing processes. In this study, agile adoption frameworks and strategies discussed in t...

FLEXI Agile Adoption Industrial Inventory (FLEXI AAII) was intended to amass current knowledge and experiences about agile adoption strategies in large settings. It was conducted among industrial partners of FLEXI project (see acknowledgements) by reviewing project deliverables, publications and other relevant material. The ground for FLEXI AAII wa...

The success of a measurement initiative in a software company depends on the quality of the links between metrics programs and organizational business goals. GQM+Strategies is a new approach designed to help in establishing links between the organizational business goals and measurement programs. However, there are no reported industrial experience...

Cooperative and social traffic is a new application domain for information and communication technology, which is under intensive research and active development. In order to achieve true cooperation, all the participants in the traffic should be able to share information, in decentralized distributed ubiquitous environments, without relying on par...

Business value analysis (BVA) quantifies the factors that provide value and cost to an organization. It aims at capturing value, controlling risks, and capitalizing on opportunities. GQM+Strategies is an approach designed to aid in the definition and alignment of business goals, strategies, and an integrated measurement program at all levels in the...

Although a number of studies have been carried out in order to identify relationship between various quality attributes of closed and open source software, a little effort has been done so far with respect to cloning and forking. Our research is aiming at bridging this gap. The goal of the paper is to study to which extend the assumptions of earlie...

This paper presents results of a literature analysis on Empirical Research Approaches in Software Engineering (SE). The analysis explores reasons why traditional methods, such as statistical hypothesis testing and experiment replication are weakly utilized in the field of SE. It appears that basic assumptions and preconditions of the traditional me...

The challenges of architectural descriptions (AD), processes and practices have become increasingly important for enterprise information system and software developers. As the development and efficient usage of different architectures are highly dependent on the quality of their documentation, there is an evident need for practical means for AD eva...

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSAN) are a combination of embedded, wireless and positioning technologies. Existing geospatial standards used in location-aware systems can be applied in building these networks, but they present challenges due to the characters of the geosensor networks. In this paper, we present a study of geospatial standa...

Establishing a software measurement programme within an organization is not a straightforward task. Previous literature surveys have focused on software process improvement in general and software measurement has been analysed in case studies. This literature survey collects the data from separate cases and presents the critical success factors tha...

The focus of the paper is to reveal the relationships between software maintainability and other internal software quality attributes. The source code characteristics of five Java-based open-source software products are analyzed using the software measurement tool SoftCalc. The relationships between maintainability and internal quality attributes a...

The paper focuses on measuring and assessing the relation of adaptive maintenance process and quality of open source software (OSS). A framework for assessing adaptive maintenance process is proposed and applied. The framework consists of six sub- processes. Five OSSs with considerable number of releases have been studied empirically. Their main ev...

The design and implementation of telecommunication systems is an incremental and iterative process, and system architectures may need to be revised and refined several times during their lifetime. Formal evaluation facilitates the identification of the weak points, where improvements are due in these architectures. In the domain of telecommunicatio...

Purpose To report the work on the design of an integrated identity verification system architecture aimed at approaching high verification accuracy, continuous security, and user‐friendliness. Design/methodology/approach The reported research corresponds to the building process in the design science research paradigm. The requirements to an identi...