Towards an Ontology for Strategic Decision Making:

Transcription

1 Towards an Ontology for Strategic Decision Making: The Case of Quality in Rapid Software Development Projects Cristina Gómez 1, Claudia Ayala 1, Xavier Franch 1, Lidia López 1, Woubshet Behutiye 2, Silverio Martínez Fernández 3 1 UPC (Catalonia), 2 U. Oulu (Finland), 3 Fraunhofer IESE (Germany) Funded by the European Union

2 Outline Q Motivation and Goal Q Research Approach Q Strategic Decision Making Ontology Q Extending the Ontology for the Case of Quality in Rapid Software Development Q Related Work Q Conclusions and Future Work 2

3 Motivation and Goal

4 Motivation Q Strategic decision making is the process of selecting a logical and informed choice from the alternative options based on key strategic indicators. o Important to follow organization s strategies. o Applied to several fields. Q Nowadays, tools as decision support systems and strategic dashboards help decision makers in the process of making decisions. Q A way of providing a common underlying language integrating the concepts to manage decisions and to handle strategic indicators is to define an ontology. 4

5 Goal Q To present the Strategic Decision Making (SDM) ontology to support different strategic decision making processes. Q To extend the SDM ontology to cover the context of managing quality in Rapid Software Development (RSD) projects. 5

6 Research Approach

7 Research Approach: The Q Rapids Context The Q Rapids approach We propose the use of ontologies to characterize the information to be managed by the strategic dashboard 7

8 Research Approach: Context and Structure of the Ontology 8

9 Research Approach: Ontology Definition Q Definition of the ontology structure: Ontology packages to group concepts with related semantics. Q Extraction of relevant terms for the ontology: These terms were discovered and confirmed from the industrial partners assessment. Q Concept characteristics: Attributes, associations with other concepts, generalizations in which the concept is involved and constraints, if any. 9

10 Strategic Decision Making Ontology

11 Strategic Decision Making Ontology: Structure 11

12 Strategic Decision Making Ontology: Relevant Terms Q Rapids DoA Industrial Partners Literature Concept Definition Examples Strategic Indicator An aspect that a company considers relevant for the decision making process Customer satisfaction, product quality, Blocking Entity Constituent part of a product and its environment for which a strategic indicator could be defined Software product, feature Factor Property of an entity (or part of it) that is related to the product quality Maintainability, reliability KPI Metric that measures the degree of achievement of a strategic indicator Percentage of user stories delivered as Planned KPI Evaluation Measurement of a KPI at a certain point of time 40% user stories delivered on time at the end of iteration 3. Role Position or purpose that someone has in an organization Product manager, software developer Concept Definition Examples Decision Determination arrived at after consideration Hiring another developer Decision Maker A person who makes decisions about a specific factor Project manager Decision Rule Rule encoding preferences of decision makers (i.e., several decision alternatives or conflicts) When a conflict arises, quality levels will be Prioritized Constraint Condition or restriction that affects to a decision Developers cannot work in 2 activities the same day External Constraint Internal Constraint Constraint representing conditions that are out of the control of decision makers Constraint that encodes conditions that may eventually influence decision making Project budget Developers cannot work in 2 activities the same day Action Something done or performed Include a quality requirement into the backlog Strategic Indicator package Decision package 12

13 Strategic Decision Making Ontology: Concept Characteristics Strategic Indicator package 13

14 Strategic Decision Making Ontology: Concept Characteristics Decision package 14

15 Extending the Ontology for the Case of Quality in Rapid Software Development

16 Quality Assessment package Rapid Software Development package Ontology Extension for the Case of Quality in Rapid Software Development Concept Definition Examples Factor Property of the software product (or part of it) that is related to the product's quality Productivity, Code quality, Reliability Process Property of the software development process Productivity Factor Product Attributes of a software product (or part of it) Code quality Factor Quality A property of the software product Maintainability Factor Data Source Contains information to calculate metrics related to the software product or process SonarQube, Jenkins, issue tracking systems Metric Provides a means to quantify factors that characterize an entity Lines of code, test coverage Entity Constituent part of a software product Feature, product tests Instrument Artifact used to determine the value of a measure, either using some tool or manually SQALE plugin of SonarQube, FindBugs Aggregation Function used to aggregate values of other measures Utility functions Concept Definition Examples Role Position or purpose that someone has in an organization Product Owner Feature Functional or non functional distinguishing characteristic of a system Apply standard theme from mail theme Catalogue Process A set of interrelated or interacting activities which transforms inputs into outputs Requirements elicitation, feature development and testing Quality Requirement Specify how well the system performs its intended functions Performance, maintainability Rapid Software Step from agile software development that focuses on organizational capability to Continuous delivery Development develop, release, and learn from software in rapid parallel cycles Release Describes an increment into complete software product valuable to customers Versions (e.g. Version 1.0 registration and login management) Sprint Short time frame, in which a set of software features is developed, leading to a working product One week sprint Project Backlog The user stories the team has identified for implementation Collection of user stories User story Simple narrative illustrating the user goals that a software function will satisfy As a < tester>, I want to <apply the first prototype standard desktop theme> so that I can <provide feedback on the concept> 16

17 Ontology Extension for the Case of Quality in Rapid Software Development: An example 17

18 Related Work

19 Related Work Reference Description Main Concepts Balance Scorecard (BSC) Business framework used for describing and measuring an organization s strategy and for tracking the actions taken to improve the results Strategic objectives, Key performance indicators (KPIs) and actions Business Motivation Metamodel (BMM) Metamodel that provides concepts for developing, communicating and managing business plans in an organized manner Strategy and goals Business Intelligence Model (BIM) Model that provides constructs for modelling business organizations at strategic level Actors and KPIs Scoro A work management software solution to track project performance Specific KPIs (return on investment, overdue project tasks/crossed deadlines) Enfocus Solutions Defines KPIs for business analysis and project management Specific KPIs (project stakeholder satisfaction index, and number of milestones missed) CBS (Center for Business Practices) Enumerates a comprehensive list of measures of project management and value in the context of IT organizations [Diamantini et al. 2014] An ontology in which KPIs are described together with their mathematics formulas KPIs Metrics (e.g., average time to repair a defect, alignment to strategic business goals) [Maté et al. 2014] Semi automatic approach that performs queries guided by the KPIs of the company to discover the existence of problems and where they are located KPIs [Maté et al. 2017] An integrated view of strategic business objectives linked to conceptual data warehouses KPIs Strategic business objectives and KPIs Decision Model and Notation (DMN) Metamodel that provides the constructs that are needed to model decisions Decision, decision maker and knowledge requirement 19

20 Conclusions and Future Work

21 Conclusions Q The SDM ontology to support different strategic decision making processes has been defined. Q An extension of the ontology to cover the context of managing quality in RSD projects has been presented. 21

22 Future Work Q To refine the SDM ontology extending it with new concepts to track the reasons of the decisions, to manage the prediction of violations of the strategic indicators and to explore corrective actions in the solution space through what if analysis. Q To evaluate the SDM ontology in the context of Q Rapids industrial partners. 22

23 Thank you for your attention