Tony Gorschek

• Professor
• Blekinge Institute of Technology

Recent studies have shown that many software developers do not have sufficient knowledge and understanding of how to develop a privacy‐friendly system. This may become a challenge in developing systems complying with data protection laws. To address this issue, we investigated the factors that influence developers' decision‐making when developing p...

Context: As the diversity and complexity of regulations affecting Software-Intensive Products and Services (SIPS) is increasing, software engineers need to address the growing regulatory scrutiny. We argue that, as with any other non-negotiable requirements, SIPS compliance should be addressed early in SIPS engineering-i.e., during requirements eng...

Context: As the diversity and complexity of regulations affecting Software-Intensive Products and Services (SIPS) is increasing, software engineers need to address the growing regulatory scrutiny. As with any other non-negotiable requirements, SIPS compliance should be addressed early in SIPS engineering - i.e., during requirements engineering (RE)...

Organisations are becoming concerned with effectively dealing with privacy-related requirements. Existing Requirements Engineering methods based on structured natural language suffer from several limitations both in eliciting and specifying privacy requirements. In our previous study, we proposed a structured natural-language approach called the “P...

Context: Machine learning (ML)-enabled systems are being increasingly adopted by companies aiming to enhance their products and operational processes. Objective: This paper aims to deliver a comprehensive overview of the current status quo of engineering ML-enabled systems and lay the foundation to steer practically relevant and problem-driven acad...

[Context] Systems that incorporate Machine Learning (ML) models, often referred to as ML-enabled systems, have become commonplace. However, empirical evidence on how ML-enabled systems are engineered in practice is still limited; this is especially true for activities surrounding ML model dissemination. [Goal] We investigate contemporary industrial...

Visualizing CI's role in software quality attribute evaluation.

Systems that use Machine Learning (ML) have become commonplace for companies that want to improve their products and processes. Literature suggests that Requirements Engineering (RE) can help address many problems when engineering ML-enabled systems. However, the state of empirical evidence on how RE is applied in practice in the context of ML-enab...

Systems that use Machine Learning (ML) have become commonplace for companies that want to improve their products and processes. Literature suggests that Requirements Engineering (RE) can help address many problems when engineering ML-enabled systems. However, the state of empirical evidence on how RE is applied in practice in the context of ML-enab...

Context Non-functional requirements (NFRs) (also referred to as system qualities) are essential for developing high-quality software. Notwithstanding its importance, NFR testing remains challenging, especially in terms of automation. Compared to manual verification, automated testing shows the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness o...

[Context] The quality of requirements engineering artifacts, e.g. requirements specifications, is acknowledged to be an important success factor for projects. Therefore, many companies spend significant amounts of money to control the quality of their RE artifacts. To reduce spending and improve the RE artifact quality, methods were proposed that c...

Software startup companies develop innovative, software-intensive products within limited time frames and with few resources, searching for sustainable and scalable business models. Software startups are quite distinct from traditional mature software companies, but also from micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, introducing new challenges...

Context and Motivation: Natural language is the most common form to specify requirements in industry. The quality of the specification depends on the capability of the writer to formulate requirements aimed at different stakeholders: they are an expression of the customer's needs that are used by analysts, designers and testers. Given this central...

Software Engineering activities are information intensive. Research proposes Information Retrieval (IR) techniques to support engineers in their daily tasks, such as establishing and maintaining traceability links, fault identification, and software maintenance. We describe an engineering task, test case selection, and illustrate our problem analys...

Software startups are newly created companies with no operating history and oriented towards producing cutting-edge products. However, despite the increasing importance of startups in the economy, few scientific studies attempt to address software engineering issues, especially for early-stage startups. If anything, startups need engineering practi...

Background - Startup companies are becoming important suppliers of innovative and software intensive products. The failure rate among startups is high due to lack of resources, immaturity, multiple influences and dynamic technologies. However, software product engineering is the core activity in startups, therefore inadequacies in applied engineeri...

The development of large, software-intensive systems is a complex undertaking that we generally tackle by a divide and conquer strategy. Companies thereby face the challenge of coordinating individual aspects of software development, in particular between requirements engineering (RE) and software testing (ST). A lack of REST alignment can not only...

Software Process Improvement (SPI) encompasses the analysis and modification of the processes within software development, aimed at improving key areas that contribute to the organizations' goals. The task of evaluating whether the selected improvement path meets these goals is challenging. On the basis of the results of a systematic literature rev...

BACKGROUND: Software Process Improvement (SPI) is a systematic approach to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of a software development organization and to enhance software products. OBJECTIVE: This paper aims to identify and characterize evaluation strategies and measurements used to assess the impact of different SPI initiatives. METHOD: T...

An impressive number of new startups are launched every day as a result of growing new markets, accessible technologies, and venture capital. New ventures such as Facebook, Supercell, Linkedin, Spotify, {WhatsApp}, and Dropbox, to name a few, are good examples of startups that evolved into successful businesses. However, despite many successful sto...

Context: Software startups are newly created companies with no operating history and fast in producing cutting-edge technologies. These companies develop software under highly uncertain conditions, tackling fast-growing markets under severe lack of resources. Therefore, software startups present an unique combination of characteristics which pose s...

Requirements Engineering and Software Testing are mature areas and have seen a lot of research. Nevertheless, their interactions have been sparsely explored beyond the concept of traceability. To fill this gap, we propose a definition of requirements engineering and software test (REST) alignment, a taxonomy that characterizes the methods linking t...

[Context and motivation] When developing software, coordination between different organizational units is essential in order to develop a good quality product, on time and within budget. Particularly, the synchronization between requirements and verification processes is crucial in order to assure that the developed software product satisfies custo...

Weak alignment of requirements engineering (RE) with verification and validation (VV) may lead to problems in delivering the required products in time with the right quality. For example, weak communication of requirements changes to testers may result in lack of verification of new requirements and incorrect verification of old invalid requirement...

Software is becoming essential for most products, manufacturing processes, and back-office functions. The speed of delivering new features and refining the product is critical to remaining competitive. Software organizations may adopt continuous engineering practices to become more efficient. However, retrofitting an organization with a pipeline is...

This article discusses the importance of managing knowledge as a resource due to its great potential to create economic value. We detail the types of knowledge resources, the challenges associated with their management, and potential solutions to maximise their utility. Our contribution is based on empirical studies performed in an industry context...

Context: Software development benefits from having Boundary Artefacts (BAs), as a single artefact can supply stakeholders with different boundaries, facilitating collaboration among social worlds. When those artefacts display inconsistencies, such as incorrect information, the practitioners have decreased trust in the BA. As trust is an essential f...

Requirements specification is a core activity in the requirements engineering phase of a software development project. Researchers have contributed extensively to the field of requirements specification, but the extent to which their proposals have been adopted in practice remains unclear. We gathered evidence about the state of practice in require...

The software value chain is knowledge-based since it is highly dependant on people. Consequently, a lack of practice in managing knowledge as a resource may jeopardise its application in software development. Knowledge-Based Resources (KBRs) relate to employees’ intangible knowledge that is deemed to be valuable to a company’s competitive advantage...

Context Maintaining the privacy of user data is a concern in software development to satisfy customer needs or to comply with privacy laws. Recent studies have shown that software de- velopment approaches still neglect non-functional requirements, including privacy. Concern about privacy may increase in the period between when a privacy law is init...

Although agile software development (ASD) has been adopted in the industry, requirements approaches for ASD still neglect non-functional requirements. Privacy has become a concern due to new user demands and data protection laws. Hence, privacy needs to be properly specified, but agile requirements engineering techniques do not explicitly represent...

Context Software companies must become better at delivering software to remain relevant in the market. Continuous integration and delivery practices promise to streamline software deliveries to end-users by implementing an automated software development and delivery pipeline. However, implementing or retrofitting an organization with such a pipelin...

During the development and maintenance of software-intensive products or services, we depend on various artefacts. Some of those artefacts, we deem central to the feasibility of a project and the product’s final quality. Typically, these central artefacts are referred to as assets. However, despite their central role in the software development pro...

Software is becoming a critical component of most products and organizational functions. The ability to continuously improve software determines how well the organization can respond to market opportunities. Continuous software engineering promises numerous advantages over sprint-based or plan-driven development. However, implementing a continuous...

Software is becoming a critical component of most products and organizational functions. The ability to continuously improve software determines how well the organization can respond to market opportunities. Continuous software engineering promises numerous advantages over sprint-based or plan-driven development. However, implementing a continuous...

Context: The concept of software craftsmanship has early roots in computing, and in 2009, the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship was formulated as a reaction to how the Agile methods were practiced and taught. But software craftsmanship has seldom been studied from a software engineering perspective. Objective: The objective of this article is to...

During the development and maintenance of software-intensive products or services, we depend on various assets. These assets are important to the feasibility of the project and influence product's final quality. However, despite their central role in the software development process, little thought is yet invested into what assets eventually are, o...

Requirements engineering remains a discipline that is faced with a large number of challenges, including the implementation of a requirements elicitation process in industry. Although several proposals have been suggested by researchers and academics, little is known of the practices that are actually followed in industry. Our objective is to inves...

The requirements engineer role is defined differently within most organizations.

[Context and Motivation] Software requirements are affected by the knowledge and confidence of software engineers. Analyzing the interrelated impact of these factors is difficult because of the challenges of assessing knowledge and confidence. [Question/Problem] This research aims to draw attention to the need for considering the interrelated effec...

Software engineering is decision intensive. Evidence‐based software engineering is suggested for decision‐making concerning the use of methods and technologies when developing software. Software development often includes the reuse of software assets, for example, open‐source components. Which components to use have implications on the quality of t...

Context and Motivation: Software requirements are affected by the knowledge and confidence of software engineers. Analyzing the interrelated impact of these factors is difficult because of the challenges of assessing knowledge and confidence. Question/Problem: This research aims to draw attention to the need for considering the interrelated effects...

Context: Software start-ups have shown their ability to develop and launch innovative software products and services. Small, motivated teams and uncertain project scope makes start-ups good candidates for adopting Agile practices. Objective: We explore how start-ups use Agile practices and what effects can be associated with the use of those practi...

Context and Motivation] Software requirements are affected by the knowledge and confidence of software engineers. Analyzing the interrelated impact of these factors is difficult because of the challenges of assessing knowledge and confidence. [Question/Problem] This research aims to draw attention to the need for considering the interrelated effect...

Context. Requirements engineering remains a discipline that is faced with a large number of challenges, including the implementation of a requirements elicitation process in industry. Although several proposals have been suggested by researchers and academics, little is known of the practices that are actually followed in industry. Objective. We in...

Context: Developing software-intensive products or services involves utilising many artefacts that are either part of the offering or part of enabling their development. These artefacts, if valuable and used more than once by the development organisation, can be seen as assets such as test cases, code, requirements, and documentation. As such, asse...

Studying and collaborating with any software-intensive organization demands for excellence in empirical software engineering research. The ever-growing complexity and context-dependency of software products, however, demands for more pragmatic and solution-focused research. This is a great opportunity but it also conflicts with the traditional ques...

Modern software development relies on a combination of development and re-use of technical asset, e.g., software components, libraries, and APIs. In the past, re-use was mostly conducted with internal assets but today external; open source, customer off-the-shelf (COTS), and assets developed through outsourcing are also common. This access to more...

Safety is an important quality attribute in the development of safety-critical systems (SCS). This attribute can be achieved by improving safety processes maturity to reduce accidents and safety incidents. In this work, we present a safety module called Uni-REPM SCS for the Uni-REPM maturity model. We describe the methodology used to develop the mo...

Component-based software engineering is a common approach in the development and evolution of contemporary software systems. Different component sourcing options are available, such as: (1) Software developed internally (in-house), (2) Software developed outsourced, (3) Commercial off-the-shelf software, and (4) Open-Source Software. However, there...

Industry-academia collaboration is one of the cornerstones of empirical software engineering. The role of researchers should be developing new practices and principles that enable industry in meeting the engineering challenges today and in the future. This chapter describes the third generation of industrial co-production in software engineering th...

[Context and motivation] Ensuring privacy of users’ data has become a top concern in software development, either to satisfy users’ needs or to comply with privacy laws. The problem may increase by the time a new law is in the vacancy period, and companies are working to understand how to comply with it. In addition, research has shown that many de...

Dear participant, thank you for sparing 10 min of your time to answer our survey (https://ww2.unipark.de/uc/PrivacyReqs/). The aim is to investigate privacy aspects in the development of software-intensive products and services, under the perspective of development teams. The goal is to better understand how privacy is taken into consideration cons...

Context: Safety-critical systems (SCS) must be carefully plannedsince inadequate or misunderstood requirements have been recognized as themajor cause of safety-related catastrophes. Objective: We investigate the inte-gration and requirements communication in the requirements engineering (RE)process among different parties when developing SCS. Metho...

Context Continuous integration (CI) is a practice that aims to continuously verify quality aspects of a software intensive system both for functional and non-functional requirements (NFRs). Functional requirements are the inputs of development and can be tested in isolation, utilising either manual or automated tests. In contrast, some NFRs are dif...

Attaining effective communication within and across organizational units is among the most critical challenges for success in software development organizations. This paper presents a novel model, supporting analysis of problems in inter-departmental communication events. The model was developed and designed based on industrial needs emphasizing fl...

Recent research has pointed out that software developers face diffi-culties to specify requirements for privacy-sensitive systems. To help addressingthis issue, this paper presents a tool, called PCM Tool, that supports the PrivacyCriteria Method (PCM) - an approach designed to guide the specification ofprivacy requirements in agile software develo...

Agile software development (ASD) has been increasingly adopted in industry. However, recent empirical works have shown that requirements approaches for ASD still neglect non-functional requirements (NFRs). From the analysis of recent works, it was noticed that although several studies were concerned with privacy requirements, none of them proposes...

Context: traditional hazard analysis techniques were not proposed to be used in the requirements engineering (RE) process. Objective: The aim of this work is to present and discuss a new method for early safety requirements specification called SARSSi* to be used at the beginning of the development of safety-critical systems. Method: this goal is a...

Background: Organizations adopting Agile Software Development (ASD) use different Knowledge Management (KM) practices to retain and share knowledge. However, it is often the case that knowledge retention is carried out in an ad-hoc way. Aims: In this study, we report our experience from proposing the Knowledge Critically Evaluation Method (KCEM) to...

Context: Safety-critical systems (SCS) are mainly controlled by software. Accordingly, the development of these systems must be carefully planned since inadequate or misunderstood requirements have been recognized as the major cause of a significant proportion of accidents and safety-related catastrophes. Objective: We investigate the integration a...

Context Component-based software engineering (CBSE) is a common approach to develop and evolve contemporary software systems. When evolving a system based on components, make-or-buy decisions are frequent, i.e., whether to develop components internally or to acquire them from external sources. In CBSE, several different sourcing options are availab...

Developing contemporary software solutions requires many processes and people working in synergy to achieve a common goal. Any misalignment between parts of the software production cycle can severely impede the quality of the development process and its resulting products. In this paper, we focus on improving means for measuring the quality of meth...

The necessity of software as stand-alone products, and as central parts of non-traditional software products have changed how software products are developed. It started with the introduction of the agile manifesto and has resulted in a change of how software process improvements (SPI) are conducted. Although there are agile SPI methods and several...

Usage of software engineering research in industrial practice is a well-known challenge. Synthesis of knowledge from multiple research studies is needed to provide evidence-based decision-support for industry. The objective of this paper is to present a vision of how a knowledge translation framework may look like in software engineering research,...

Software process improvement (SPI) is an instrument to increase the productivity of, and the quality of work, in software organizations. However, a majority of SPI frameworks are too extensive or provide guidance and potential improvement areas at a high level, indicating only the symptoms, not the causes. Motivated by the industrial need of two Sw...

Knowledge-intensive companies that adopt Agile Software Development (ASD) rely on efficient implementation of Knowledge Management (KM) strategies to promote different Knowledge Processes (KPs) to gain competitive advantage. This study aims to explore how companies that adopt ASD implement KM strategies utilizing practices that promote the KPs in t...

Context: Software start-ups are emerging as suppliers of innovation and software-intensive products. However, traditional software engineering practices are not evaluated in the context, nor adopted to goals and challenges of start-ups. As a result, there is insufficient support for software engineering in the start-up context.

Context Start-up companies have become an important supplier of innovation and software-intensive products. The flexibility and reactiveness of start-ups enables fast development and launch of innovative products. However, a majority of software start-up companies fail before achieving any success. Among other factors, poor software engineering cou...

[Context] Quality requirements are important for product success yet often handled poorly. The problems with scope decision lead to delayed handling and an unbalanced scope. [Objective] This study characterizes the scope decision process to understand influencing factors and properties affecting the scope decision of quality requirements. [Method]...

Context : Quality requirements are important for product success yet often handled poorly. The problems with scope decision lead to delayed handling and an unbalanced scope. Objective : This study characterizes the scope decision process to understand influencing factors and properties affecting the scope decision of quality requirements. Method :...

The concept of ‘Minimum Viable Product’ (MVP) is largely adapted in the software industry as well as in academia. Minimum viable products are used to test hypotheses regarding the target audience, save resources from unnecessary development work and guide a company towards a stable business model. As the game industry is becoming an important busin...

Context: The development of Safety-Critical Systems (SCS) requires an adequate understanding of safety terms to avoid the specification of poor, incomplete or unclear safety requirements. However, there are some misunderstandings, mostly by requirements engineers, about the definition of such concepts. Hence, integration of safety concerns in the R...

Component-based software engineering is a common approach to develop and evolve contemporary software systems where different component sourcing options are available: 1) Software developed internally (in-house), 2) Software developed outsourced, 3) Commercial of the shelf software, and 4) Open Source Software. However, there is little available re...

Context: Software startups aim to develop innovative products, grow rapidly, and thus become important in the development of economy and jobs. Requirements engineering (RE) is a key process area in software development, but its effects on software startups are unclear. Objective: The main objective of this study was to explore how RE (elicitation,...

Context The principal focus of lean is the identification and elimination of waste from the process with respect to maximizing customer value. Similarly, the purpose of agile is to maximize customer value and minimize unnecessary work and time delays. In both cases the concept of waste is important. Through an empirical study, we explore how waste...

Knowledge-intensive companies that adopt Agile Software Development (ASD) relay on efficient implementation of Knowledge Management (KM) strategies to promotes different Knowledge Processes (KPs) to gain competitive advantage. This study aims to explore how companies that adopt ASD implement KM strategies utilizing practices that promote the KPs in...

We have conducted in-depth interviews with experienced practitioners in the Safety-Critical Systems (SCS) domain in order to investigate several aspects related to requirements specification and safety analysis for SCS. We interviewed 19 practitioners from eleven SCS companies in different domains with the intention of verifying which approaches th...

Software start-ups are new companies aiming to launch an innovative product to mass markets fast with minimal resources. However, most start-ups fail before realizing their potential. Poor software engineering, among other factors, could be a significant contributor to the challenges that start-ups experience. Little is known about the engineering...