Samuel Fricker

FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts | FHNW · i4Ds Centre for Requirements Engineering

Context: Agile maturity models (AMMs) suggest that Agile practices are introduced in a certain order. However, whether the order of Agile practice introduction as suggested in the AMMs is relevant in industry has not been evaluated in an empirical study. Objectives: In this study, we want to investigate: (1) order of Agile practice introduction men...

[Context and motivation] To validate developers’ ideas of what users might want and to understand user needs, it has been proposed to collect and combine system monitoring with user feedback. [Question/problem] So far, the monitoring data and feedback have been collected passively, hoping for the users to get active when problems emerge. This appro...

Background: A number of Agile maturity models (AMMs) have been proposed to guide software organizations in their adoption of Agile practices. Typically the AMMs suggest that higher maturity levels are reached by gradually adding more practices. However, recent research indicates that certain Agile practices, like test-driven development and continu...

To assess the benefits of introducing Agile practices, it is important to get a clear understanding of the baseline situation, i.e. the situation before their introduction. Without a clear baseline, we cannot properly assess the extent of impacts, both positive and negative, of introducing Agile practices. This paper provides a preliminary guidelin...

Mobile computing and the Internet of Things promises massive amounts of data for big data analytic and machine learning. A data sharing economy is needed to make that data available for companies that wish to develop smart systems and services. While digital markets for trading data are emerging, there is no consolidated understanding of how to pri...

Companies are interested in knowing how users experience and perceive their products. Quality of Experience (QoE) is a measurement that is used to assess the degree of delight or annoyance in experiencing a software product. To assess QoE, we have used a feedback tool integrated into a software product to ask users about their QoE ratings and to ob...

Product management has become an established discipline in many industries since Procter and Gamble introduced it in 1931. During the last decades, most software product companies—such as Microsoft, IBM, and Google—have implemented Software Product Management (SPM). So did a few corporate information technology organizations in essentially all indu...

Strategic Management is an activity within an organization with the objective to define, plan, agree, implement and evaluate the organization’s strategy. It is part of the responsibility of executive management who can delegate preparatory work to staff functions. Strategic Management includes a number of elements related to software product manage...

Product planning is a core activity of a software product manager as described in the Software Product Management Framework. In this book, we differentiate the following processes: Roadmapping: the strategic and long-range planning of how a software product shall evolve. Product Requirements Engineering: the collection, analysis, and documentation...

Companies are usually founded to participate in the economy as organizations that exist in the long term. In spite of all modernistic focus on the short term, it must be a key objective of any executive management to make the company’s success sustainable. Based on this concept of sustainability, this book emphasizes the importance of state-of-the-...

It is part of the concept of an “enterprise” that people with different abilities, experiences, and skills work together as employees to reach common goals. Typically this cooperation is governed by a division of work so that the individual strengths of each employee can be optimally utilized. The task of management lies in the definition and commu...

The pace of technological change in the past several decades has been faster in the IT industry, specifically in the software sector, than in any other industry. This development makes it necessary for the organizations concerned, both software vendors and corporate IT organizations, regularly to make far-reaching decisions under uncertainty that h...

The Bonseyes EU H2020 collaborative project aims to develop a platform consisting of a Data Marketplace, a Deep Learning Toolbox, and Developer Reference Platforms for organizations wanting to adopt Artificial Intelligence. The project will be focused on using artificial intelligence in low power Internet of Things (IoT) devices ("edge computing"),...

Purpose Software product management (SPM) unites disciplines related to product strategy, planning, development, and release. There are many organizational activities addressing technical, social, and market issues when releasing a software product. Owing to the high number of activities involved, SPM remains a complex discipline to adopt. The purp...

This book gives a comprehensive overview on Software Product Management (SPM) for beginners as well as best practices, methodology and in-depth discussions for experienced product managers. This includes product strategy, product planning, participation in strategic management activities and orchestration of the functional units of the company. The...

Many new products, or services offered as a product, are expected to solve customer problems in new ways or exploit available technology in new or better ways. To innovate, a company needs to have a reliable understanding of the state-of-the-art. That need concerns both, an understanding of the problems that may be addressed and the solutions that...

Background: There are several frameworks that attempt to address the challenges of evaluation of health information systems by offering models, methods, and guidelines about what to evaluate, how to evaluate, and how to report the evaluation results. Model-based evaluation frameworks usually suggest universally applicable evaluation aspects but do...

Evolution of a software product is inevitable as product context changes and the product gradually becomes less useful if it is not adapted. Planning is a basis to evolve a software product. The product manager, who carries responsibilities of planning, requires but does not always have access to high-quality information for making the best possibl...

There have been longstanding discussions whether social or technological factors eventually determine the speed of innovation, in particular when it comes to implementation. In order to identify and quantify potential resistance and implementation risks in the health domain we propose a set of key parameters, which are measurable in both - the soci...

Shared understanding of requirements between stakeholders and the development team is a critical success factor for requirements engineering. Workshops are an effective means for achieving such shared understanding. Stakeholders and team representatives can meet and discuss what a planned software system should be and how it should support achievin...

The paper will introduce the work currently undertaken within FI-STAR, a FI-PPP Use Case in the e-Health domain. It will present the various issues and challenges faced by the developers in compliance to FI-PPP GE and SEs specifications. It will introduce the Quality indicators the project developed to help ensuring sustainability of the developmen...

This paper refers to the term 'implementation' as the process of integrating a new technology into established workfows. Especially in health care this has proven to be a very critical phase and many large-scale projects have failed on this very last mile. Although strategies such as requirements engineering, co-designing and user interaction desig...

Healthcare and well-being have captured the attention of established software companies, start-ups, and investors. Software is starting to play a central role for addressing the problems of the aging society and the escalating cost of healthcare services. Enablers of such digital health are a growing number of sensors for sensing the human body and...

Many software solutions have failed because they did not meet stakeholder needs. In response to this problem, a massive amount of techniques were developed to elicit stakeholder needs, to analyze the implications of these needs on the software, to specify proposed software products, and to check acceptance of these proposals. However, many of these...

Quality requirements, an important class of non-functional requirements, are inherently difficult to elicit. Particularly challenging is the definition of good-enough quality. The problem cannot be avoided though, because hitting the right quality level is critical. Too little quality leads to churn for the software product. Excessive quality gener...

Shared understanding is essential for efficient software engineering when the risk of unsatisfactory out-come and rework of project results shall be low. Today, how-ever, shared understanding is used mostly in an unreflected, ad-hoc way. This affects the quality of the engineered soft-ware solutions and generates re-work once the quality prob-lems...

Software product management (SPM) as a discipline in-cludes many practices like product and release planning, market analysis, roadmapping, and product lifecycle management. Product management frameworks prescribe these practices but companies seldom adopt all of them. We conducted a state-of-practice survey with the aim to in-vestigate how compani...

To create value with a software ecosystem (SECO), a platform owner has to ensure that the SECO is healthy and sustainable. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are used to assess whether and how well such objectives are met and what the platform owner can do to improve. This paper gives an overview of existing research on KPI-based SECO assessment usin...

Context New products create significant opportunities for differentiation and competitive advantage. To increase the chances of new product success, a universal set of critical activities and determinants have been recommended. Some researchers believe, however, that these factors are not universal, but are contextual. Objective: This paper reports...

IT organizations need to react to changes in the business, the domain (e.g., regulatory issues), and the technological development. While some of these changes can be handled by adopting agile practices, others might have large, irreversible effects on the organization as a whole. While flexibility and agility have found their way into software pr...

Recent Internet of Things (IoT) research has been aiming at interoperability of devices and the integration of sensor networks. The Future Internet – Private Public Partnership (FI-PPP) has created a whole array of different purpose-oriented modules with defined specifications, better known as Generic Enablers. This article gives an overview of leg...

Conway's law assumes a strong association between the system's architecture and the organization's communication structure that designs it. In the light of contemporary software development, when many companies rely on geographically distributed teams, which often turn out to be temporarily composed and thus having an often-changing communication s...

Many reference models were developed for software process im-provement. Each model, however, is an idealized prescription that is applicable in a limited set of situation only. This paper has investigated how an existing reference model can be tailored to a domain it has not been designed for initial-ly. The tailoring approach is based on translati...

Many large and distributed companies run agile projects in development environments that are inconsistent with the original agile ideas. Problems that result from these inconsistencies can affect the productivity of development projects and the timeliness of releases. To be effective in such contexts, the agile ideas need to be adapted. We take an...

SaaS cloud computing, in contrast to packaged products, enables permanent contact between users of a software product and the product-owning company. When planning the development and evolution of a software product, a product manager depends on reliable information about feature attractiveness. So far, planning decisions were based on stakeholder...

Shared understanding is essential for efficient communication in soft-ware development and evolution projects when the risk of unsatisfactory outcome and rework of project results shall be low. Today, however, shared understanding is used mostly in an unreflected, intuitive way. This is particularly true for implicit shared understanding. In this p...

Software organizations increasingly see themselves confronted with software solutions evolved and maintained with more than a single development project. The delta specifi-cations and artifacts that result from each project make reuse difficult and challenge a company's ability to innovate. Software product management is a growing discipline for un...

Context and motivation] Requirements catalogues for software release planning are often not complete and homogeneous. Current release planning approaches, however, assume such commitment to detail – at least implicitly. [Question/problem] We evaluate how to relax these expectations, while at the same time reducing release planning effort and increa...

People have many creative ideas, but only a few of these ideas are realized and lead to innovation. Good ideas often fail because they are not shared between innovators and stakeholders, hence are unlikely to be realized. Consequently, many opportunities are missed to excite customers and to gain a competitive advantage. This paper proposes an inno...

A release plan defines the short-term evolution of a software product in terms of development project scope. In practice, release planning is often based on just fragmentarily defined requirements. Current release planning approaches, however, assume that a requirements catalogue is available in the form of a complete flat list of requirements. Thi...

Requirements engineering research has for a long time focused on specification quality, leading to recommendations of how to engineer "perfect" requirements specifications. Practitioners, however, do not have the time, resources, and interests for overdoing requirements engineering. Rather, many situations call for shortcuts that allow investing ef...

The design of the variability of a software product line is crucial to its success and evolution. Meaningful variable features need to be elicited, analyzed, documented and validated when an existing software or reference system evolves into a software product line. These variable features are the main discriminators between individual products and...

Companies in the software business often distribute requirements engineering responsibilities over several roles. Product management has overall product responsibility and performs early-phase market-driven requirements engineering. Product development implements the product and performs late-phase solution-oriented requirements engineering. Such s...

Product success depends on skilled and competent product management. In essence, a product manager decides what functionality and quality a product should offer, to which customers, and when in time, while assuring a winning business case. Software product management is particularly important when the product is envisioned, developed, and deployed...

[Context & motivation] Market-oriented development involves the collaboration of many stakeholders that do not necessarily directly interact with a given development project but still influence its results. These stakeholders are part of the requirements value chain for the concerned software product. [Question/problem] Understanding the structure...

Software product management steers the success of a product in all its lifecycle stages by thoughtful application of planning, coordination, and control. The third international workshop on software product management (IWSPM´09) was held in conjunction with the International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE'09) in Atlanta USA. The aim was...

Requirements engineering focuses on good specification practices but has yet to find working solutions for effective requirements communication. Inadequate communication and tacit assent to a demanding customer's requests make it hard to fully understand a project's requirements. A negotiation process, called handshaking with implementation pro...

The product development environment facing most companies today requires a long-term perspective featuring the conception and development of long-term innovations. This can be hard when close quarter bottom-line results dominate. Without innovation, competitive advantages decrease over time. This is especially true for companies producing softw...

Handshaking is an approach to communicate requirements from a customer to a supplier that allows the customer to use requirements for steering solution development in a pragmatic, goal-oriented manner. Feed-forward, realized by tailoring the requirements to the supplier, increases communication efficiency. Feedback, realized by reviewing a supplier...

Cite as: Abstract. The development of software products and systems generally requires collaboration of many individuals, groups, and organizations that form an ecosystem of interdependent stakeholders. The way the interests and expectations of such stakeholders are communicated is critical for whether they are heard, hence whether the stakeholders...

Es gibt heute eine Vielzahl von Frameworks, die aus verschiedenen Perspektiven die Grundzüge des Re- quirements-Engineering und -Management beschreiben (z.B. Prozess-, Informations- und Reifegradmodel- le). In unterschiedlichem Maße berücksichtigen sie Belange der Software-Produktlinienentwicklung. Der Arbeitskreis "Requirements-Engineering-Framewo...

Product development organizations often distribute the responsibilities for requirements engineering over several roles. The collaboration of product management, concerned with market needs, and product development, concerned with the technological aspects of a product, is well established. Such shared responsibility provides advantages in the util...

Customers, product managers, project leaders, architects, engineers, and other stakeholders are negotiating requirements throughout the software lifecycle. Even-though fundamental for understanding requirements engineering, negotiation has not been as thoroughly studied as other facets of this engineering discipline. This paper casts requirements e...

GREW´07 was held in conjunction with the International Conference on Global Software Engineering in Munich Germany. The aim was to bring researchers and industry practitioners together to discuss the area of global product development from a requirements engineering and product management perspective. The workshop aimed to analyze selected challeng...

The design of engineering processes is dependent on the context they are designed for. This paper presents the results of an action research study that used design rationale to discover a number of contextual factors that provide criteria for designing a requirements engineering process in a given product line environment. The presented context dim...

Strong stakeholder networks are important for the success of engineering efforts. Such networks reflect the results of negotiation activities among stakeholders in terms of needs, capabilities, backing and knowledge. The larger and more distributed an engineering organization is, the more important it is to understand how such stakeholder networks...

GREW'07 brings researchers and industry practitioners together to discuss the area of global product development from a requirements engineering and product management perspective. The workshop aims at analyzing selected challenges, which are put forward by accepted papers, in detail. The session discussions then lift the view in an attempt to iden...

Handshaking between product management and R&D is key to the success of product development projects. Traditional requirements engineering processes build on good quality requirements specifications, which typically are not achievable in practical circumstances, especially not in distributed devel- opment where daily communication cannot easily be...

Software requirements are defined in many industries using informal software requirements specifications that are based on standards such as IEEE 830. Also, in teams of small to medium-sized projects there are often no experienced requirements engineers. These two factors leave product development efforts in a tar pit of ambiguities and misundersta...

This ICB Research Report constitutes the proceedings of the following events which were held during the Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ) conference 2011 in Essen, Germany. Requirements Engineering Efficiency Workshop (REEW). Requirements Prioritization for customer-oriented Software-Development (RePriCo). Workshop o...