Rory V. O’Connor

Dublin City University | DCU · School of Computing

The highly dynamic world of information technology service management stresses the benefits of the quick and correct implementation of IT services. A disciplined approach relies on a separate set of assumptions and principles as an agile approach, both of which have complicated implementation processes as well as copious benefits. Combining these t...

While the quality of products is a competitive advantage for very small software development organizations, the usage of Software and Systems Engineering standards amongst such very small organizations is extremely low. A key factor in the literature explaining this lack of quality standards adoption is the perception by small and very small organi...

Software Process Improvement efforts (SPI) are pursued by organizations for improving the overall quality of their software development processes. However, very small entities (VSEs) avoid them by the lack of required financial and other organizational resources. In contrast, VSEs use agile software development methodologies (ASDMs), but these ASDM...

In recent years there has been an increased use of serious games to help increase the level of knowledge and experience of individuals working in different domains. In particular serious games for educational purposes have been used in many domains including software engineering and computer science [1]. Hence, this study proposes a quantitative re...

Software development is a complex endeavor that encompasses application and implementation layers with functional (refers to what is done) and non-functional (how is done) aspects. The efforts to scale agile software development practices are not wholly able to address issues such as integrity, which is a crucial non-functional aspect of the softwa...

This paper investigates the biological, psychological and societal reasoning for the disparity of females in the software engineering industry and how a more diverse workforce can have an advantage in this sector. Studies show that diversity in a company positively correlates to its financial profits. Furthermore, a severe lack of women in software...

The software tester is an imperative component to quality software development. Their role has transformed over the last half a century and volumes of work have documented various approaches, methods, and skillsets to be used in that time. Software projects have gone from using monolithic architectures and heavyweight methodologies, to service-orie...

Driven the necessity of providing alternative approaches to the traditional pedagogical teaching process, the use of gamification and serious games has become a successful approach to motivate, engage and be effective for the current generation of learners. Considering the advantages of serious games, our work describes the experience of using a se...

In this paper we will discuss the changing role of a software engineer. We will examine this from four major standpoints, the software development lifecycle, the influence of open source software, testing and deployment and the emergence of new technologies. We will first analyze what the role of a software engineer was in the past. We will examine...

Open‐source software (OSS) is a type of computer software wherein the source code is distributed under a special type of licence in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to inspect, alter, and redistribute the software. OSS projects are collaborative endeavours which have multiple contributors who are constantly joining, leaving, or ch...

The International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP) provides a leading forum for the exchange of research outcomes and industrial best practices in process development from software and systems disciplines. ICSSP 2018 was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, May 26 to 27, 2018, colocated with the 40th International Conference on Software E...

In recent years, an increasing interest has been observed in the development and use of simulations, serious games (SGs) and gamification strategies to teach software project management (SPM) in a highly practical way. The current SGs for SPM have a quite specific scope, are not able to provide and dynamically change game scenarios during the life...

Software engineering is a set of activities that relies no only on technical tasks but also requires abilities focused on social duties such as daily meetings and product introduction presentations. However, engineers may experience elevated levels of anxiety when required to present their work in an unfamiliar environment. More specifically, they...

The complexity of the production process of software development is due to poor communication channels among or within software development teams. Games can be considered as one of the ancient feedback mechanisms which not only guide us to conduct a systematic form of persuasion especially in non-gaming context but also foster communication and col...

The International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP), continuing the success of Software Process Workshop (SPW), the Software Process Modeling and Simulation Workshop (ProSim) and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) conference series, has become the established premier event in the eld of software and systems en...

The International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP), continuing the success of Software Process Workshop (SPW), the Software Process Modeling and Simulation Workshop (ProSim) and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) conference series, has become the established premier event in the eld of software and systems en...

The International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP), continuing the success of Software Process Workshop (SPW), the Software Process Modeling and Simulation Workshop (ProSim) and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) conference series, has become the established premier event in the field of software and systems...

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 26th European Conference on Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement, EuroSPI conference, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in September 2019. The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 28 submissions. They are organized in topical sections: Visionary P...

Emerging digital technologies are being used in many ways by and in particular virtual environments provide new opportunities to gain experience on real-world phenomena without having to live the actual real-world experiences. In this study, a quantitative research approach supported by expert validation interviews was conducted to determine the av...

Abstract. A primary concern of software development is selecting a suitable methodology to implement a software project. However, this selection is affected by many factors, with evidence suggesting that a specific set of factors defines a specific situational context for a project. This situational context leads to a project-specific software proc...

The International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP), continuing the success of Software Process Workshop (SPW), the Software Process Modeling and Simulation Workshop (ProSim) and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) conference series, has become the established premier event in the field of software and systems...

Software development is a complex process of collaborative endeavour which requires hands-on experience starting from requirement analysis through to software testing and ultimately demands continuous maintenance so as to mitigate risks and uncertainty. Therefore, training experienced software practitioners is a challenging task. To address this ga...

The Agile Manifesto is a philosophical touchpoint for all agile software development (ASD) methods. We examine the manifesto and certain agile methods in an effort to identify the major impacts of ASD. We have encountered some difficulty in delineating agile and non-agile software processes, which is partially the result of terminological confusion...

Context: In recent years the interest in using serious games for software engineering, software process, software project management and software process standards education has increased significantly. The ISO 21500 standard is an international reference standard that provides generic guidance and good practices in project management. Objective: T...

In their earlier work, the authors had a sustained engagement with situational factors affecting software development, particularly how these factors affect the software development process. Part of this previous engagement involved the development of a situational factors reference framework. As part of an ongoing industrial engagement, the author...

Agile systems development methodologies (ASDMs) have gained high acceptance in very small entities (VSEs) of software development seeking quality at minimal effort. SCRUM and XP in industrial settings and UPEDU in academic ones are main of them. Similarly, Software Process Improvement (SPI) initiatives promote the utilization of process frameworks...

Very small entities (VSEs) are organizations with up to 25 people. The ISO/IEC 29110 series of standards and guides target VSEs with little or no experience or expertise in selecting the appropriate processes from lifecycle standards and tailoring them to a project’s needs. This article gives an overview of ISO/IEC 29110, some examples of VSEs that...

Augmented reality (AR) is a technological field of study that bridges the physical and digital world together with a view to improving user experience. AR holds great potential to change the delivery of software services or software process improvement by utilizing a specific set of components. The purpose of this exploratory study is to propose an...

This edited volume covers essential and recent development in the engineering and management of data centers. Data centers are complex systems requiring ongoing support, and their high value for keeping business continuity operations is crucial. The book presents core topics on the planning, design, implementation, operation and control, and sustai...

The main international Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) process frameworks such as ITIL V3 and the ISO/IEC 20000-4, includes a service design process as part of their mandatory set of processes. Nevertheless, even with such availability of processes, their used nomenclature, their phase-activity structure, and their granularity leve...

Small software companies have to work hard in order to survive. They usually find it challenging to spend time and effort on improving their operations and processes. Therefore, it is important to address such needs by the introduction of a proposed framework that specifies ways of getting things done while consciously encourage them to enhance the...

Serious games involve applying game design techniques to tasks of a serious nature. In particular, serious games can be used as informative tools and can be embedded in formal education. Although there are some studies related to the application of serious games for the software development process, there is no serious game that teaches the fundame...

Context: The interest in the use of serious games as learning resources for software process standards education and training has increased significantly in recent years. Objective: The main purpose of this work is to record, analyze and characterize the state of the art related to serious games for software process standards education with the goa...

Bu çalışmada, tecrübeli yazılım geliştiricilerden, yeni katılan geliştiricilere aktarılmasını beklenen bilgileri, ve bu bilginin katılımcıya olan değerini anlatmak için neler yapıldığı araştırılacaktır. Bu sayede, işe veya projeye yeni başlayan geliştiricilerin organizasyonu ve sosyal yapıyı daha verimli bir şekilde tanıması ve anlaması öngörülmekt...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination, SPICE 2017, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in October 2017. The 34 full papers presented together with 4 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. The papers are organized...

The software development process is a set of socio-technical activities to produce software artifacts in which humans play a crucial role. Since it is a people centric activity, factors such as user motivation, engagement, communication and collaboration might constrain these activities. Therefore, software business organizations stand to benefit f...

Over the past six years, we have examined the impact of situational context of the software development process. Our early work involved the systematic development of a comprehensive situational factors reference framework. More recently, our efforts have focused on the application of this reference framework to different types of situational conte...

Bringing professional practice into the learning/teaching process is an especially difficult task in the scope of software project management and can turn into a challenge in the context of software process standards education. The ISO 21500 standard is an international reference standard that provides generic guidance and good practices in project...

Open Source Software is a term used to identify software developed and released under an “open source” license, meaning that under certain conditions; it is openly available for use, inspection, modification, and for redistribution free of cost (or with cost based on the license agreement). Incorporation of OSS while developing software can reduce...

Public speaking anxiety is a type of social phobia, which might be commonly seen in novice software engineers. It is usually triggered by a fear of social performance especially when the performer is unfamiliar with the audience. Today, many software engineering activities (e.g. code inspection, peer review, daily meetings, etc.) require social gat...

This paper addresses the need for correct and consistent use of concepts and terms in engineering environments. It provides guidance on how to formulate a corporate terminology policy as a pre-requisite for managing corporate language, designing and implementing a terminology process, and eventually writing definitions and creating new terms. The s...

Application lifecycle management (ALM) highlights the rules of the road for the entire software ecosystems’ lifecycle. Successful ALM enables clarity around the entire delivery effort, from defining requirements to deploying the software product. One of the challenges in software engineering today is to orchestrate ALM tools to a set of software pr...

Teaching Software Project Management (SPM) for Information Technology (IT) learners is a relevance issue. The necessity of teaching SPM in a highly practical way moves trainers towards the use of new methods and techniques such as simulations, serious games or gamification strategies. The majority of the existing serious games for SPM do not offer...

The software development process is continuously changing, there is huge pressure to condense release cycles into shorter and shorter timeframes, tools are changing dramatically and companies must continually examine the efficacy of their development process. Attempting to hit a moving target is difficult and it is a decision which can have a major...

The ISO/IEC 29110 standard aims to assist and encourage Very Small Entities (VSEs) in understanding, adopting, assessing and improving their software processes to their specific needs. Although the integration of international software standards in VSEs is a relevant topic, the learning/teaching process is a considerable challenge for industrial tr...

Very small entities (VSEs) — organizations with up to 25 people — are very important to the worldwide economy. The products they develop are often integrated into products made by larger enterprises. However, it has been established that such entities often do not utilize existing best practice standards and frameworks such as ISO/ IEC/IEEE 12207 s...

This paper discusses the use of two different standards for teaching Systems Engineering (SE): ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 and ISO/IEC 29110. The first one is a general and widely-used standard describing the lifecycle processes of the entire system, whereas the second one is a relatively new standard based on a reduced set of standards elements focused on...

From its earliest days, software development has been beset with challenges in relation to timely delivery, appropriateness of features, and quality of deliverables. Many advances in software development processes have helped to address these concerns. For example, agile software development has helped to deliver working software more frequently, a...

The volume at hand presents the special issue of the 9th International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) 2016, which was held in Austin, Texas from May 14–15, 2016. ICSSP is the premier venue for research related to software and system development processes and has become an important mediator for industry and academia. To answer q...

Context: Research has shown that a significant number of software projects fail due to social issues such as team or personality conflicts. However, only a limited number of empirical studies have been undertaken to understand the impact of individuals' personalities on software team configurations. These studies suffer from an important limitation...

While the quality of products is a competitive advantage for very small software development organizations, the usage of Software and Systems Engineering standards amongst such very small organizations is extremely low. A key factor in the literature explaining this lack of quality standards adoption is the perception by small and very small organi...

Software Process Improvement efforts (SPI) are pursued by organizations for improving the overall quality of their software development processes. However, very small entities (VSEs) avoid them by the lack of required financial and other organizational resources. In contrast, VSEs use agile software development methodologies (ASDMs), but these ASDM...

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th EuroSPI conference, held in Ostrava, Czech Republic, in September 2017. The 56 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on SPI and VSEs, SPI and process models, SPI and safety, SPI and project management...

Software and systems engineering is distinct from other forms of engineering as it deals with an intangible product, where the progress in construction is not explicitly visible and team members often rely on the documentation of others to follow and review progress. Furthermore unlike traditional engineering disciplines, there is no single standar...

For very small software development companies, the quality of their software products is a key to competitive advantage. However, the usage of Software Engineering standards is extremely low amongst such very small software companies. A primary reason cited by many such companies for this lack of quality standards adoption is the perception that th...

ocial aspects of software development are gaining increasing attention among the research community. Recently, a number of researchers have conducted studies to explore the social structure of software development activities that may potentially affect the health of a software project. Games are special kind of social activities, which can easily h...

The trend in using games in elementary level education also spreads through higher education levels and specific domains such as engineering. Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in the usage of games in software engineering. In this paper, we are presenting a systematic review and analysis of 350 papers regarding games in softwar...

The International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP), continuing the success of Software Process Workshop (SPW), the Software Process Modeling and Simulation Workshop (ProSim) and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) conference series, has become the established premier event in the field of software and systems e...

The software development industry is dominated by a myriad of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The main goal of this chapter is to provide a characterization of SMEs based on previous studies. It also includes an overview of a number of software process models and software process improvement (SPI) models, which are aimed at assisting SM...

The generic software development situational factors model has been developed in order that environments within which software is developed can be profiled and better understood. Situational context is a complex concern for software developers, with a broad set of situational factors holding the potential to affect any one software development proj...

Agile development requires a highly iterative and collaborative design process, which relies on the successful interpretation of software development activities amongst team members throughout the overall process. However, contemporary methods and tools that support agile efforts provide little help in addressing context-specific tacit knowledge, w...

The software development industry is dominated by a myriad of smaller organizations world-wide, including very small entities (VSEs), which have up to 25 people. Managing software process is a big challenge for practitioners. In 2011, due to the VSEs’ increasing importance, a set of ISO/IEC 29110 standards and guides were released. Although other i...

The ISO/IEC 29110 Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities is a relatively new standard aimed at addressing the particular development needs of very small companies. Due to its relative youth in the standards domain there is a lack of detailed case studies surrounding its actual deployment in industrial settings. The purpose of this paper is to d...

In work that is ongoing, the authors are examining the extent of software development process terminology drift. Initial findings suggest there is a degree of term confusion, with the mapping of concepts to terms lacking precision in some instances. Ontologies are concerned with identifying the concepts of relevance to a field of endeavour and mapp...

This paper outlines the details of nine case studies involving the pilot usage of the new ISO/IEC 29110 Lifecycle Profiles for Very Small Entities standards and guides, which were specifically designed to address the standardization needs of Very Small Entities. The purpose of this paper is to disseminate the early success stories from pilot trials...

This paper reports on a grounded theory to study into software developers’ use of software development processes in actual practice in the specific context of very small companies. This study was conducted in three very small software product companies located in Ecuador. The data collection was based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with...

A large majority of organizations very small entities (VSEs)—commercial, government, or not-for-profit organizations; departments; or projects with up to 25 people who develop systems with hardware and software components and/or software products. Their products are sold to their customers directly or are integrated into those developed by larger o...

In June 2015 a group of experts in Software Process Improvement (SPI) and Education from all over the world gathered at the 1st International Workshop on Software Process Education, Training and Professionalism held in connection with 15th International Conference Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination. Discussions with key playe...

Although there are various kinds of processes designed to manage the complexities of software development, it is still a challenging endeavor. Recently, a significant number of researchers have started to investigate social problems such as incompatibilities with respect to personality that is likely to be encountered in all stages of the software...

The “best practices” of international software standards are considered important in improving the software process. The ISO/IEC 29110 standard defines lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities (VSEs) and VSEs have also been recognized important in the software industry. Since this standard is novel, practitioners need to be actively engaged in th...

The practice of software development has evolved considerably in recent decades, with new programming technologies, the affordability of hardware, pervasive internet access and mobile computing all contributing to the emergence of new software development processes. The newer process initiatives, which include those which are sometimes referred to...

Software process improvement is considered one of the most important fields in the software engineering discipline. However in spite of its importance, increasing its coverage in educational settings is still challenging. By influencing the syllabus for university level graduate and undergraduate courses, to include quality and process improvement,...