Seminal presentation of the Q-Rapids project at the REFSQ 2017 conference as a research preview paper

1. Funded by the
European Union
How can Quality Awareness support
Rapid Software Development? –
A Research Preview
Liliana Guzmán, Marc Oriol, Pilar Rodríguez,
Xavier Franch, Andreas Jedlitschka, Markku Oivo
Presented at REFSQ’17 (Essen, Germany; February 2017)

2. Context and motivation
Agile Software Development
+
Continuous Software Engineering [2]
Rapid Software Development (RSD) [3]
[2] Fitzgerald, B., Stol, K.J.: Continuous software engineering: a roadmap and agenda. JSS 123, 2017.
[3] Mäntylä, M.V. et al.: On rapid releases and software testing: a case study and a semi-systematic literature review. EMSE 25(2), 2015.
[4] Rodríguez, P. et al.: Continuous deployment of software intensive products and services: a systematic mapping study. JSS 123, 2017.
Faster and more frequent release cycles should not compromise software quality
Lack of methods to support quality requirements (QRs)
management during the RSD process [4]

3. Challenges in managing QRs
• QRs and their management: need for improved approaches for
‒ QR elicitation and specification
‒ Understanding the strategic impact of QRs on management and business
• QRs in RSD:
‒ Seamless integration of QRs and functional requirements
‒ Suggestion of QRs for the system
• Data-driven quality decision making: need of scalable and efficient
‒ Continuous monitoring of heterogeneous data at development time and runtime
‒ QR-drive data analysis to support decisión making
The Q-Rapids framework

4. The Q-Rapids Framework
Prioritised
Product
backlog
Software
system
Mined
data
Developer
Decision
maker
Product
backlog
Prioritisation Development process
Generation of
new/modified
candidate quality
requirements
+
-
End-user
System
behaviour
Sw repos
information
Developer
daily work
Quality-aware strategic
Decision making dashboard
Decision
Rules
User feedback
& behaviour
Quality
requirements
System
monitors
Internal
constraints
External
constraints
Validation
Analyst
Requirements

5. Evaluation
Requirements
elicitation
Proof of
concept
Consoli-
dated
approach
Final
solution
Nov. 2016 Oct. 2019

6. Some high-level common goals and situations
• The new process shall integrate as much as possible in the current WoW
• Some difficulty in identifying the rationale for strategic goals
‒ Decision-making based greatly in tacit knowledge
• Data-driven approaches and fully automated collection of data wildly desired
‒ Challenge: they do use several useful tools but not under a holistic view
• They have lots of data but they do not know how to make them actionable
• They all go rapid (or at least agile) but they do not follow any method strictly

7. Funded by the
European Union