Improving Software Process Accountability with Spago4Q

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Improving Software Process Accountability with
Spago4Q

• Ernesto Damiani, Fulvio Frati
• University of Milan Italy
• Sergio Oltolina, Gabriele Ruffatti
• Engineering Ingegneria Italiana Italy

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Introduction

• Accountability has been treated in most of
  environments where the achieving of the results
  implies cooperative team work
• economics, engineering, law,
• Acknowledgment and assumption of responsibility
  for actions, products, decisions, and policies
• Include the obligation to report, explain and be
  answerable for resulting consequences

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Introduction (contd)

• Accountability has been adopted and integrated by
  computer scientists, especially in case of large
  and scattered working teams
• who has done what
• In current development processes could be
  achieved following invasive procedures
• obliges developers to strictly follow
  organizations policies, making accountability an
  onerous task

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Our Work

• We present the open source tool Spago4Q for
  process monitoring
• based on a metamodel representation of process
  and measurement framework
• adaptable to any software development process
• exploit non-invasive techniques for data
  collecting
• Incorporate accountability features in future
  releases

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Related Work

• K. Parris proposes an accountability model in
  real working environments
• exchange of accountings (a report of what you
  have done) and consequences (feedback on your
  actions)
• taking into consideration relationship between
  the development team, managers and stakeholders
• ? process-independent
• Team Software Process (TSP) by SEI
• industrial strength, modern, large-scale,
  integrated framework that guides development
  teams in producing high-quality
  software-intensive systems
• every activity and the accomplishment of
  milestones are tracked through an extensive use
  of documents, implying the complete respect of
  the discipline? process-dependent ? invasive
  for developers

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Spago4Q Platform

• Spago4Q (SpagoBI for Quality) fully adopts a
  meta-model representation of process and
  measurement frameworks
• adaptable to complex organizational contexts,
  independently from the development processes,
  infrastructure tools, measurement and assessment
  frameworks
• suitable for process assessment, such as
  effectiveness of development software process and
  quality inspection of the released software
• data and measures collected with non-invasive
  techniques
• open to the assessment of software engineering
  concepts such as accountability

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The Metamodel

• Three main requirements
• supporting across-processes data collection
• supporting multiple metrics frameworks, including
  Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) models
• analyzing process and product data supporting
  company-wide as well as per-process views
• Requirements met by a meta-model representing
• the process(es) to be monitored
• the measurement to be taken
• assessment framework to be used
• Components have been designed independently to
  allow the same measurement framework to different
  processes

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Spago4Q Platform

• Open source product that could be freely adopted
  from any organizations
• The metamodel approach allows real cross-process
  measurement regimes
• the same measurements can be applied to projects
  following different developing paradigms
• under some circumstances, data from these
  measurements could be gathered and analyzed
  together
• possible to build organization-specific
  extractors to deal with particular file formats

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Spago4Q Platform Conceptual Structure
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Spago4Q to Improve Accountability

• Exploits its capability to collect data and
  measures from the project management and
  development tools to support maturity
  assessments, effectiveness of process and quality
  inspection
• Spago4Q is a platform suitable for
  accountability, tracking
• developers access to code
• developers achieving of projects goals and
  milestones
• and producing ad-hoc accountability analysis and
  reporting

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Spago4Q to Improve Accountability (contd)

• Spago4Q could be configured to produce reports
  that combine data extracted from code
  repositories (such as Subversion) and planning
  tools (such as Polarion), to track the respect
  for each developers of milestones and goals, and
  the activity on specific classes or documents
• Gives an effective assessment of project risks
  basing on specific developers activities

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Code Probe Integration

• To achieve such results, Spago4Q embed specific
  monitoring applications
• PROM tool (www.prom.case.unibz.it) track
• developer activities at a very fine-grained level
  of granularity
• interactions within the user and the IDE
  environment (save, compile, commit, )
• Values collected are combined with Spago4Q data
  and analyzed in specific reports

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Conclusions

• We presented Spago4Q, tool developed in
  particular for process maturity assessments, that
  represents a solution to monitor and report the
  accountability aspect of the process
• Its approach exploits data colleting techniques
  that request an effort to developers that is as
  lower as possible and it do not imply any changes
  to their typical work activities

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Contact Information

• Web Site
• SesarLab sesar.dti.unimi.it
• Spago4Q www.spago4q.org
• Email
• frati_at_dti.unimi.it