Luigi Buglione

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at École de Technologie Supérieure

Poor requirements management is often detrimental to estimation of project effort, duration, and costs. Various problems in eliciting and specifying requirements during estimation, such as ambiguous requirements at various levels of granularity and limited attention to nonfunctional requirements, lead to underestimates or estimation error larger th...

A common challenge in life is to evaluate and deal with risks. Even though Risk management is fundamental to any activity, it is too often evaluated and managed from a qualitative rather than a quantitative perspective. In order to improve, too often organizations are seeking compliance against a single model/approach, forgetting that most often 'o...

In Information and Communication Technology (ICT) a ‘deliverable’ may be either software (perceived as an ‘output’) or a service (perceived as an ‘outcome’). On the one hand, the differences between software and service have led to the design of parallel models and lifecycles with more commonalities than differences, thereby not supporting the adop...

Quality' is an evolving concept, quite difficult to be defined, whatever the application domain observed. As Tom Demarco said, it's true that "you cannot control what you cannot measure". But coming back, it's also true that "you cannot measure what you cannot define" and again "you cannot define what you don't know". Thus, moving from a common, sh...

Support for research and development in information technology is considered today as critical by most governments in the industrially advanced countries. Traditionally the way of stimulating research has been to ensure to the investor the appropriability of the returns generated. Such appropriability is typically implemented by means of the Intell...

This chapter discusses how software architects from 21 European project organizations cope with quality requirements (QRs) in large, contract-based systems delivery projects. It reports on the roles that architects played in QRs engineering, their interactions with other project roles, the specific actions architects took to help discover, document...

ICT can provide a definitive contribution in reducing CO2 emissions and, in general, in the environment preservation. Because its pervasiveness in today's life, software in particular plays an important role in achieving such a goal. Software process is the combination of those practices, directly or indirectly involved in software development, ope...

Over the past few years ISO has published a number of specific standards detailing processes included in a generic form in software development life cycle models. ISO 15939 on the Measurement process itself is an example of such specific ISO standard. This paper presents some suggestions for improvements to its Measurement Information Model and to...

The single factor that best correlates with software development effort is size. This knowledge has led to the development of several size measurement methods, both 'physical' and 'logical'. Although the functional size accounts for most of the effort variation, a large part of that variation is still unexplained by the functional size only. The la...

Context When dealing with improvements, organizations seek to find a break-even point as early as possible in order to maximize ROI. In some cases such a strategy can lead to long-term failures by not realizing full benefits, when focusing only on the short-term. LEGO (Living Engineering Process) allows building customized process meta-models based...

Although the Agile Software Development (ADS) approach has been around for the last 15 years, it is only recently that attention has moved towards Agile Software Management (ASM) for tackling some of the management-related weaknesses, such as estimating on the basis of User Story points. This paper presents an application of the INVEST criteria (In...

During the past 20 years Maturity & Capability Models (MCMs) become a buzzword in the ICT world. Since the initial Crosby's idea in 1979, plenty of models have been created in the Software & Systems Engineering domains, addressing various perspectives. By analyzing the content of the Process Reference Models (PRM) in many of them, it can be noticed...

Sustainability of software depends on several factors including the processes deployed to develop, operate, maintain and dispose software systems. To make such sustainability-related processes actually deployable and controllable, specific green metrics and indicators are necessary. In this paper we propose a sound methodological approach to derive...

The software process landscape is rich in complexity and many alternative software development approaches have emerged over the past 40 years. However, no single software development approach is universally implemented and it seems likely that no single approach can be universally useful. One of the primary reasons that no single approach is univer...

[Context/motivation] Quality requirements (QRs) are a concern of both requirement engineering (RE) specialists and software architects (SAs). However, the majority of empirical studies on QRs take the RE analysts'/clients' perspectives, and only recently very few included the SAs' perspective. As a result, (i) relatively little is known about SAs'...

Software projects often fail, because they are not adequately managed. The establishment of effective and efficient project management practices still remains a key challenge to software organizations. Striving to address these needs, "best practice" models, such as, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) or the Project Management Body of...

Web-based asynchronous store-and-forward telemedicine systems for diagnostic purposes, which enable the consultation of (one or more) distant health care professional(s) by a locally present health care professional concerning a patient’s diagnosis and treatment can significantly improve healthcare services. Yet, developing high-quality asynchronou...

Software development is a complex process for which numerous approaches have been suggested. However, no single approach to software development has been met with universal acceptance, which is not surprising, as there are many different software development concerns. In addition, there are a multitude of other contextual factors that influence the...

Even if the 'measurement' and 'estimation' issues are one of the most relevant issues for the proper management of a project, its origin besides in a good management of its requirements. In fact, estimation is highly dependent on the quality of requirements elicitation and management. Therefore, the management of requirements should be prioritized...

Support for research and development in information technology is considered today as critical by most governments in the industrially advanced countries. Traditionally the way of stimulating research has been to ensure to the investor the appropriability of the returns generated. Such appropriability is typically implemented by means of the Intell...

There is growing attention paid to the increasing in the global carbon dioxide production and to the subsequent issue of sustainability in ICT-related projects. But very few information and time has been spent right now for determining a set of related measures from sustainable processes. Moving from a new set of three sustainable processes in the...

Developing high-quality asynchronous store-and-forward telemedicine systems (ASFTSs) remains a challenge. However, there is no accepted understanding as to what are the important quality characteristics for this type of software system and/or what defines a mature software process for producing high-quality ASTFSs. Through adopting a multi-step res...

Welcome to the 2nd Workshop on Managing the Client Value Creation Process in Agile Projects (VALOIR) at the PROFES 2012 conference! The overall goal of VALOIR is to make the knowledge on value creation and management explicit, encouraging the discussion on the use of measurement and estimation approaches in managing value in agile project.

One of the main challenges for ICT organizations is to initiate a well-structured process improvement program. This is particularly the case when adopting a maturity & capability model (MCM) as it brings with it costs associated with internal appraisals, and the realization that in order to achieve a particular maturity level (ML) a number of proce...

Estimation represents one of the most critical processes for any project and it is highly dependent on the quality of requirements elicitation and management. Therefore, the management of requirements should be prioritised in any process improvement program, because the less precise the requirements gathering, analysis and sizing, the greater the e...

Estimating size or resources is one of the most important topics in software engineering and IT. You won't deliver according to expectations if you don't plan, and you can't plan if you don't know the underlying dependencies and estimates. This column is an overview of estimation. It covers estimation methods and provides an overview and evaluation...

The customization of software process capability/maturity models (SPCMMs) to specific domains/sectors or development methodologies represents one of the most discussed and applied trends in ICT organizations. Nonetheless, little research appears to have been performed on how theoretically sound and widely accepted SPCMMs should be developed to high...

'Agile' is become one of most known and used ICT buzzwords of last 10 years. More recently a plenty of 'Agile Maturity Models' were proposed, trying to evaluate the maturity (and capability) levels of an organization using such approach. The aim of this paper is to propose a feasible way to apply the 'maturity model' concept in a 'light' way for Ag...

Agile Project Management (APM) is widely used in different software projects from different application domains. APM includes a series of commonly used project management approaches with the intent to handle better uncertainty and unpredictability, which is not always successful. For instance, in a large portion of software projects, accurate plann...

A complicated and time-consuming phase in the development of Maturity/Capability Models (MCMs) is the identification of existing relevant source models as, currently, information on existing MCMs is provided in very different forms and levels of detail on diverse web sites, publications etc. In this paper, we present our ongoing research on develop...

The availability of integrated software tools can help organizations to easily and quickly achieve higher maturity and capability levels in process improvement and change management initiatives, by effectively supporting easy data and information sharing. However, despite their usefulness, their implementation costs still often represent a not triv...

Context The establishment of effective and efficient project management practices still remains a challenge to software organizations. In striving to address these needs, �best practice� models, such as, CMMI or PMBOK, are being developed to assist organizations interested in improving project management. And, although, those models share overlappi...

Business value is a key concept in agile software development. This paper presents results of a case study on how business value and its creation is perceived in the context of agile projects. Our overall conclusion is that the project participants almost never use an explicit and structured approach to guide the value creation throughout the proje...

There is a growing interest during last years in a better understanding of the inner meaning of 'product value' as perceived from the final customer, looking at possible techniques and new ways to anticipate and better capturing requirements from early stages. But even if more and more professionals and IT organizations achieve certifications on th...

Software process assessment (SPA) is an effective tool to understand an organization’s process quality and to explore improvement opportunities. The knowledge represented as good-practices to develop assessment methods is, unfortunately, scattered in the literature concerned with developing either lightweight or heavyweight SPA methods. This paper...

The adoption of functional size measurement (FSM) methods in software organizations is growing. In particular, special attention is being paid to the COSMIC method, because of its novelties against 1st generation FSM methods such as IFPUG FPA. One of the main problems facing organizations wanting to use COSMIC is how to properly convert the softwar...

This paper reports on an experiment that investigates the predictability of software project size from software product size. The predictability research problem is analyzed at the stage of early requirements by accounting the size of functional requirements as well as the size of non-functional requirements. The experiment was carried out with 55...

Agile became one of the most used 'buzzwords' in ICT projects in these recent years but the growing diffusion and interest of its related methods and techniques was not accompanied by the same maturity in sizing and estimation practices. In particular the application of a functional size measurement (FSM) method for sizing requirements is not typic...

Estimation is still a challenging process for planning and managing software projects. Often, estimates are being done on experiential or analogous basis or using effort estimation models. Mostly, these approaches take software size (e.g., Lines of Code, Function Points, Object points) and other cost factors as the main inputs to estimation. This s...

Increasing litigation in the software industry is a growing concern for software engineers. In some cases it can be a serious threat to the software commercial and financial success. Looking at current software best practice frameworks and international standards we have not found any guidance on legal assurance for software engineers. Project Mana...

This paper presents the results of the ASAI (Automotive SPICE Assessors and Improvers) working group. The aim of the ASAI is to address open issues in the real application of the standard Automotive SPICE in the automotive industry. The outcomes of the ASAI activities are a set of guidelines on how some relevant open issues (expressed by means of q...

Support for research and development in information technology is considered today as critical by most governments in the industrially advanced countries. Traditionally the way of stimulating research has been to ensure to the investor the appropriability of the returns generated. Such appropriability is typically implemented by means of the Intell...

Support for research and development in information technology is considered today as critical by most governments in the industrially advanced countries. Traditionally the way of stimulating research has been to ensure to the investor the appropriability of the returns generated. Such appropriability is typically implemented by means of the Intell...

During the past 20 years Maturity Models (MM) become a buzzword in the ICT world. Since the initial Crosby’s idea in 1979, plenty of models have been created in the Software & Systems Engineering domains, addressing various perspectives. By analyzing the content of the Process Reference Models (PRM) in many of them, it can be noticed that people-re...

During the past 10 years, the amount of effort put on setting up benchmarking repositories has considerably increased at the organizational, national and even at international levels to help software managers to determine the performance of software activities and to make better software estimates. This has enabled a number of studies with an empha...

One of the key elements for the viability of information system projects is given by the adoption of legal assurance activities and measures since nowadays they can arise legal risks that, in some cases, can suppose a serious threat for project commercial and financial success. When calculating the return of investment (ROI) for a software process...

Software development companies today are widely using software functional size measurement (FSM) as the main variable to assess the effort and time needed to perform a new software project. In the recent years, this has led to a grown interest in improving the way the measures are taken.In such sense, one of the main aspects that could have impact...

Résumé : L'estimation des projets de développement de logiciels est un défi pour la plupart des organisations de développement de logiciels; c'est également un défi pour leurs clients qui subissent des débordements considérables des budgets, des retards importants par rapport aux échéanciers, moins de fonctionnalités que promises et avec des niveau...

The project effort calculation with a functional size measurement method such as COSMIC can only be properly performed after the “Requirements Analysis” phase in a Project Life Cycle. The goal of this research is to investigate an early and project-level tuned prediction of the product size with the intent to reduce the effect of the ‘cone of uncer...

Agile requirements engineering is the approach of choice for many software producers whose realities include highly uncertain requirements, use of new development technology, and clients willing to explore the ways in which an evolving product can help their business goals. From customer's perspective, the activity of continuous requirements reprio...

One of the main issues faced within the Functional Size Measurement (FSM) community is the convertibility issue between FSM methods. A particular attention during last years was devoted to find a mathematical function for converting IFPUG functional size units to the newer COSMIC ones. Moving from the data sets and experiences described in previous...

Agile software projects are characterized by iterative and incremental development, accommodation of changes and active customer participation. The process is driven by creating business value for the client, assuming that the client (i) is aware of it, and (ii) is capable to estimate the business value, associated with the separate features of the...

Software effort estimation is still a significant challenge for software management. Although Functional Size Measurement (FSM) methods have been standardized and have become widely used by the software organizations, the relationship between functional size and development effort still needs further investigation. Most of the studies focus on the...

In this paper, we discuss basic issues related to measurements performed in the domains of software engineering and metrology. Similarities and differences are highlighted, with the aim of analyzing the level of knowledge in both domains. A theoretical approach is followed, allowing the proposal of a measurement process model, which is used as a gu...

From the late ‘70s on, Albrecht’s Function Point Analysis provided an insightful way to size a software system moving from the elicitation of Functional User Requirement (FUR), making an evaluation more objective than done before using Lines of Code (LOC). This technique has currently a plenty of variants, some of them become international de jure...

This paper discusses and analyses the opportunity to approach a typical TQM qualitative technique such as Root-Cause Analysis (RCA), expressed with the well-known Ishikawa (or Fishbone) diagrams, in a quantitative manner. Adding a control measure at the end of each 'cause bone' can help decision-makers in their determination of corrective/improveme...

One of the most debated issues in Software Engineering is effort estimation and one of the main points is about which could be (and how many) the right data from an historical database to use in order to obtain reliable estimates. In many of these studies, software size (measured in either lines of code or functional size units) is the primary inpu...

Effort estimation is a significant practical problem in software engineering, and various cost drivers, including software size, which might have an impact on it have been explored. In many of these studies, total software size (measured in either lines of code or functional size units) is the primary input. However, the relationship between effort...

In recent years, a number of well-known groups have developed sets of best practices on software measurement, but from different perspectives. These best practices have been published in various documents, such as ISO 15939, the CMMI model and the ISBSG data repository. However, these documents were developed independently and, as a result, for a s...

In this paper, the authors discuss the issues associated to measurements executed in the domains of software engineering and metrology. Similarities and differences are highlighted also with the aim of discussing the level of knowledge in both domains. A measurement process model is proposed and used as a guiding scheme throughout this paper. It is...

The size attribute of software has been measured by classifying different types of externally observable features of a software entity, such as inputs and outputs, and then by measuring those features. Each measurement method measures different types of features in a different way. Among various approaches to software size measurement, the methods...

This paper discusses and analyzes possible solutions for achieving an effective process improvement in one specific key process area: measurement, whatever the maturity level and without the constraints of a software process improvement model staged representation. It investigates in particular a Support Process Area, that is, Causal Analysis & Res...

The 30-year experience from the Software Measurement field explains that a strong resistance usually comes from project team members, supposing the real objective is a personal evaluation on their performance and not a neutral measurement for a concrete process improvement. Concurrently, from the middle '80s a series of SPI models - such as the Sof...

Tracking and control" activities in software projects are most often based, in industry, on just two dimensions of analysis: time and cost. Most often, these activities exclude other dimensions (such as quality, risks, impact on society, the stakeholders' viewpoint in a broader sense) taken into account in Performance Management models such as EFQM...

Traditional cost estimation models in software engineering are based on the concept of productivity defined as the ratio of output to input; for instance, detailed software estimation models, such as COCOMO, can take multiple factors into account, but their multipliers lead to a single perspective based on the productivity concept. A less explored...

Risk management is gaining greater visibility in organizations, but is not always tightly integrated within Project Management: often risks are managed separately from the project plan, which is not revised accordingly, nor are revisions made to project estimates during the project lifetime. An open research issue is how to integrate risk evaluatio...

Software measurement is still emerging as a field of knowledge, and, most often, traditional quality criteria of measurement methods such as repeatability, reproducibility, accuracy and convertibility are not even investigated by software measurement method designers. In Software Engineering, the Functional Size Measurement (FSM) community has been...

Assessing software product quality has become more and more relevant and important to managers, even though it is still challenging to define and measure the detailed quality criteria and to integrate them into quality models. Software engineering standards can help establish a common language for these detailed criteria and, in parallel, implement...

A Balanced Scorecard (BSC) presents the quantitative goals selected from multiple perspectives for implementing the organizational strategy and vision. However, in most current BSC frameworks, including those developed for the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field, each perspective is handled separately. None of these perspectives is...

this paper to consider creativity and innovation management earlier on in such SPI models. Also in this paper, we propose, in an exploratory way, a method for mapping, tracing and measuring creativity, based on two entities: the CA matrix and the Creativity Indices

This document presents the high-level design of a knowledge-based system to assist measurers in applying a functional measurement method consistently and systematically to often quite complex software applications which, moreover, may be from various application domains. The knowledge model underlying the proposed system is built on the key concept...

This paper is the product of a workshop held in Amsterdam during the Software Technology and Practice Conference (STEP 2003). The purpose of the paper is to propose Bloom’s taxonomy levels for the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) topics for three software engineer profiles: a new graduate, a graduate with four years of e...

In recent years, several Total Quality Management (TQM) techniques have been introduced for better Software Quality Management. One of these techniques is Quality Function Deployment (QFD). This papers shows how QFD has been applied to an existing software quality assessment technique, the Quality Factor technique (QF). This improved technique, QF2...

Every project - whatever the application field - should be managed taking into account at least four dimensions: Time, Cost, Quality and Risk. To manage these dimensions, a key tool for a Project Manager is to increase project visibility, defined as the amount of information about the project associated with its probability of occurrence. This pape...

Measurement is progressively becoming a mainstream management tool to help ICT organizations plan, monitor and control. However, measurement itself is not a mature domain of knowledge in software engineering. The assessment of proposed measurement indicators in these process improvement models is investigated, and a methodology is proposed for the...

This paper presents and describes a Web-based implementation of a three-dimensional software quality measurement model. The implementation is based on the 2003 version of the ISO quality model for software products: ISO 9126. The prototype presented includes all the 120+ measures proposed in the ISO standard, as well as weight assignments, target v...

Process and product measurement is one of the key topics in the Software Engineering field. There already exists a significant number of one-dimensional (1D) models of performance, which integrate all individual measurements into a single performance index. However, these types of models are too over-simplified to adequately reflect the multi-dimen...

A Balanced Scorecard (BSC) presents the quantitative goals selected from multiple perspectives for implementing the organizational strategy and vision. However, in most current BSC frameworks, including those developed for the Information and Communication Technology field, each perspective is handled separately. None of these perspectives is integ...

Assessing software product quality has become more and more relevant and important to managers, even though it is still challenging to define and measure the detailed quality criteria and to integrat e them into quality models. Software engineering standards can help establish a common language for these detailed criteria and, in parallel, implemen...

This paper compares two quantitative approaches recommended for developing and supporting software process improvements, that is, the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) technique and the Balanced Scorecard (BSc) framework. While both offer the opportunity to implement a quantitative analysis of software projects, they are often misinterpreted as either int...

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) technique has been developed in the context of Total Quality Management, and it has been experimented in the software engineering domain. This paper illustrated how key constructs from QFD contributed to an development of a second version of a Quality Factor (QF) for a qualitative software evaluation, considering t...

This work presents the geometrical and statistical foundations of a three-dimensional model of a software project performance model called qest (Quality factor+Economic, Social and Technical dimensions). In this model, the three dimensions taken into consideration are combined through the use of a regular tetrahedron geometrical representation of a...

This paper presents a Quality Factor (QF) for software to give quality a value, relevant for all three viewpoints considered. QF uses an open weight scale methodology, to let you use the preferred measurement scale. Since the fundamental relevance to permit the adoption of a common IT language and to have an external comparability of your own inter...

This work presents an improved version of an open multi-dimensional model of performance, called QEST (Quality factor + Economic, Social and Technical dimensions) [8]. Performance is defined here as productivity adjusted by quality, both of which can be represented from multiple viewpoints. The QEST model integrates into a single representation thr...

Tracking & Control" activities in software projects are most often based, in industry, on just two dimensions of analysis: time and cost. Most often, 'tracking & control' excludes other dimensions (such as quality, risks & impact on society, stakeholders' viewpoint in a broader sense) taken into account in Performance Management models such as EFQM...

Organizational performance models are usually based on accounting systems, and therefore take into account mostly the economic-financial viewpoint, or the tangible asset part, of it using performance management terminology. In the IT field, the Earned Value model has been promoted to be present project performance during the project life cycle. How...