Department of IT Management
The department conducts research on software development methods, human judgment and decision making in software development contexts, benefits management, cost estimation, risk and uncertainty management, use of contracts and models for user involvements. The main research approach is empirical, including controlled experiments, observational studies, case studies and surveys.
The department’s main goal is to discover important relationships and connections related to the management of software development work, and use this to contribute to substantial improvement in software development processes and products. For this purpose, we work in close collaboration with industry partners in most of our research. We emphasize the transfer of new and useful knowledge to the industry by publishing and presenting not only in academic venues, but also at industry venues.
The IT Management Department also runs Hovedstadsområdets nettverk for IT-styring og ledelse (HIT-Nettverket), which is a network with the goal of increasing competance through sharing experiences in IT management. The network consist of research institutes, IT companies, consultant companies, public stakeholders and clients with an interest in IT management. The themes includes focuses both in the client and the supplier perspective, in addition to strategic, administrative and project related challenges. Read more about HIT here.
In addition, the department is in charge of the EDOS center (Effective Organization of Public Sector). This center is funded by the Ministry of Local Government and Modernization and was created in 2020. EDOS conducts surveys and analyzes information on digitalization in the public sector. The research aims to provide knowledge about what leads to successful digitalization in the public sector and to disseminate knowledge that leads to higher efficiency and more value creation. Read more about EDOS here.
People at Department of IT Management
Who we are?
Simula Metropolitan employees are researchers, postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, engineers and administrative people. We are from all over the world, ranging from newly educated to experienced researchers, all working on making research in digital engineering at the highest international level possible.
Publications at Department of IT Management
Journal Article
Experiential Learning Approach for Software Engineering Courses at Higher Education Level
Journal of Computing in Higher Education (2021).Status: Submitted
Experiential Learning Approach for Software Engineering Courses at Higher Education Level
Background: Software project management activities help to introducing software process models in Software Engineering courses. However, these activities should be adequately aligned with the learning outcomes and support student's progression.
Objective: Present and evaluate an approach to help students acquire theoretical and practical knowledge and experience real-world software projects' challenges. The approach combines a serious game and a design-implement task in which students develop a controlled-scale software system.
Methods: To evaluate our approach, we analyzed the students' perceptions collected through an online survey, their project plans, and their final reports using thematic analysis.
Results: Results suggest that the approach promotes knowledge acquisition, enables students' progression, reinforces theoretical concepts, and is properly aligned with the course's learning outcomes.
Conclusion: The approach seems to help introducing software process models in Software Engineering courses. Our experience can also be inspiring for educators willing to apply our approach in similar courses.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Journal | Journal of Computing in Higher Education |
| Publisher | Springer |
Determining a Core View of Research Quality in Empirical Software Engineering
Empirical Software Engineering (2021).Status: Submitted
Determining a Core View of Research Quality in Empirical Software Engineering
Context: Research quality is intended to appraise the design and reporting of studies. It comprises a set of concepts such as methodological rigor, practical relevance, and conformance to ethical standards. Depending on the perspective, different views of importance are given to the conceptual dimensions of research quality.
Objective: We intend to assess the level of alignment between researchers with regard to a conceptual model of research quality. This includes aligning the definition of research quality and reasoning on the relative importance of quality characteristics.
Method: We conducted a mixed-methods approach with two distinct group perspectives: (i) a research group; and (ii) the empirical software engineering research community. Our data collection approach comprised a questionnaire survey and a complementary focus group. We carried out a hierarchical voting prioritization to collect relative values for importance.
Results: In the context of this research, ‘internally valid’, ‘relevant research idea’, and ‘applicable results’ are perceived as the core dimensions of quality. The alignment at the research group level was higher compared to that at the community level.
Conclusion: The interdisciplinary model of research quality was seen to express fairly the quality of research in the software engineering context. It presented limitations regarding its structure and components' description, which resulted in an updated model.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Journal | Empirical Software Engineering |
| Publisher | Springer |
Risks and risk mitigation in global software development: an update
Journal of Software: Evolution and Process (2021).Status: Submitted
Risks and risk mitigation in global software development: an update
Context: Interest in global software development (GSD) has led to the publication of numerous studies. Over time, these studies should be updated to verify if their findings and conclusions remain valid.
Objective: To update a tertiary study, published in 2014, focused on investigating risks and risk mitigation advice in the context of GSD.
Method: We conducted a systematic literature study based on forward snowballing, out of which we identified and selected 25 unique studies.
Results: We extracted: a) 122 risks (75 of which already identified in the original work), and b) 123 mitigation advice (44 of which were identified in the original work). The evidence supporting these risks and mitigation were extracted from 619 and 389 primary sources, respectively. Given the amount of evidence found, we have reported only those with higher empirical support. The raw data, including all the values obtained, are available online as complementary material.
Conclusions: Interest in GSD, its potential risks, and possible mitigation strategies, remains high. This update has allowed increasing the level of empirical support provided by the findings of the original work.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management, EDOS: Effective Digitalization of Public Sector |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Journal | Journal of Software: Evolution and Process |
| Publisher | John Wiley & Sons Ltd |
Archetypes of delay: An analysis of online developer conversations on delayed work items in IBM Jazz
Information and Software Technology 129 (2021): 106435.Status: Published
Archetypes of delay: An analysis of online developer conversations on delayed work items in IBM Jazz
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Journal | Information and Software Technology |
| Volume | 129 |
| Pagination | 106435 |
| Publisher | {Elsevier |
Journal Article
Revealing the State-of-the-Art in Large-Scale Agile Development: A Systematic Mapping Study
arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.05578 (2020).Status: Submitted
Revealing the State-of-the-Art in Large-Scale Agile Development: A Systematic Mapping Study
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 2020 |
| Journal | arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.05578 |
| Publisher | arXiv |
Evaluation of Probabilistic Project Cost Estimates
Submitted to a journal (2020).Status: Submitted
Evaluation of Probabilistic Project Cost Estimates
Evaluation of cost estimates should be fair and give incentives for accuracy. These goals, we argue, are challenged by a lack of precision in what is meant by a cost estimate and the use of evaluation measures that do not reward the most accurate cost estimates. To improve the situation, we suggest the use of probabilistic cost estimates and propose guidelines on how to evaluate such estimates. The guidelines emphasize the importance of a match between the type of cost estimate provided by the estimators and the chosen cost evaluation measure, and the need for an evaluation of both the calibration and the informativeness of probabilistic cost estimates. The feasibility of the guidelines is exemplified in an analysis of a set of 69 large Norwegian governmental projects. The evaluation indicated that the projects had quite accurate and unbiased P50 estimates and that the prediction intervals were reasonably well calibrated. It also showed that the cost prediction intervals were non-informative with respect to differences in cost uncertainty and, consequently, not useful to identify projects with higher cost uncertainty. The results demonstrate the usefulness of applying the proposed cost estimation evaluation guidelines.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 2020 |
| Journal | Submitted to a journal |
| Publisher | - |
A field experiment on trialsourcing and the effect of contract types on outsourced software development
Submitted to a journal (2020).Status: Submitted
A field experiment on trialsourcing and the effect of contract types on outsourced software development
Context: To ensure the success of software projects, it is essential to select skilled developers and to use suitable work contracts. Objective: This study tests two hypotheses: (i) the use of work-sample testing (trialsourcing) improves the selection of skilled software developers; and (ii) the use of contracts based on hourly payment leads to better software project outcomes than fixed-price contracts. Method: Fifty-seven software freelancers with relevant experience and good evaluation scores from previous clients were invited to complete a two-hour long trialsourcing task to qualify for a software development project. Thirty-six developers completed the trialsourcing task with acceptable performance, and, based on a stratified allocation process, were asked to give a proposal based on an hourly payment or a fixed-price contract. Eight hourly payment-based and eight fixed-priced proposals were accepted. The process and product characteristics of the completion of these 16 projects were collected and analysed. Results and Conclusion: Only partial support for our hypotheses was observed. While the use of trialsourcing may have prevented the selection of developers with insufficient skills, the performance on the trialsourcing task of the selected developers did not predict performance on the project. The use of hourly payments led to lower costs than fixed-price contracts, but not to improved processes or products. We plan to follow up these, to us unexpected, results with research on how to design more skill-predictive trialsourcing tasks, and when and why different project contexts give different contract consequences.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 2020 |
| Journal | Submitted to a journal |
| Publisher | - |
Relative and absolute estimates of software development effort
submitted to a journal (2020).Status: Submitted
Relative and absolute estimates of software development effort
Context: There are many claims, but not much evidence, about advantages connected with the use of relative instead of absolute estimates.
Objective: We test the claims that people are better at giving relative estimates, that producing relative estimates is faster, and that, relative effort to a large extent is developer-independent.
Method: We conducted two experiments. The first experiment addresses the two first claims and analyses the estimates from 102 professional software developers randomly allocated to providing relative or absolute estimates of software development effort and other quantities. The second experiment addresses the third claim and analyses the actual efforts from 20 professional software developers completing the same five programming tasks.
Results: We found, for most of the estimation tasks, only smaller differences between relative and absolute estimates, which is consistent with a similarity in underlying estimation processes. The time spent completing the estimation work was higher or the same for those using relative estimation. We found a strong developer-dependency in relative use of effort, suggesting that relative estimates are far from developer-independent.
Conclusions: The results give no support to the claims that relative estimation is better, faster or that relative effort to a large extent is developer-independent.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 2020 |
| Journal | submitted to a journal |
| Publisher | - |
Practices connected to perceived client benefits of software projects
IET Software 14, no. 6 (2020): 677-683.Status: Published
Practices connected to perceived client benefits of software projects
It is well-documented that many software projects deliver fewer benefits than planned. However prior research has had a stronger focus on the ability to deliver within budget, on time and with the specified functionality, than on what to do to successfully deliver client benefits. The authors have conducted a survey collecting information about benefits management practices, agile practices, use of contracts, and the perceived success in delivery of client benefits. The authors received responses from 83 software professionals with information about 73 recent and 74 older software projects. There was no statistically significant improvement of the delivered client benefits from the older to the recent projects. Statistically significant findings, applying a general linear model-based analysis, include that the degree of success in delivering client benefits is connected to a project having: (i) a plan for how to realise the benefits, (ii) implemented practices for benefits management during project execution, (iii) frequent deliveries to production during the project execution, and (iv) a process for the evaluation of realised benefits after project completion. The authors argue that greater use of these practices represents a potential for organisations to increase their success in delivering benefits from software projects.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 2020 |
| Journal | IET Software |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pagination | 677-683 |
| Publisher | The Institution of Engineering and Technology |
When 2 + 2 should be 5: The work effort summation fallacy in judgment-based estimation
submitted to a journal (2020).Status: Submitted
When 2 + 2 should be 5: The work effort summation fallacy in judgment-based estimation
Estimates of work effort (e.g., work hours, man-months) for project tasks are often based on expert judgments, which in turn are used for calculating the total work effort, total costs, and duration of a project. Because actual work effort outcomes are realizations of probabilistic distributions (e.g., the work has a 20% chance of requiring more than 80 work hours), an estimate does not have an inherent meaning but can represent any value of the assumed outcome distribution, such as the most likely (mode) value. Only estimates reflecting the mean (i.e., expected value) can be added together into estimates of total work effort without changing the meaning of the estimate (the aggregate estimate is still an estimate of the mean). In Studies 1 and 2, we find that software professionals and companies provide estimates that vary substantially in meaning. This makes the aggregation of these estimates difficult. In Studies 3 and 4, we observe that a substantial proportion of software professionals either naïvely sum non-mean estimates to derive the total work effort, or provide total estimates that are otherwise incompatible with the probabilistic meaning of their estimates of individual tasks. In Study 5, we show that improper aggregation strategies can produce over- and underestimation and prediction intervals that are far too wide. The lack of a common understanding of an estimate, coupled with the tendency to aggregate estimates by naïve summation, is likely to produce biased cost estimates at the level of projects or project portfolios.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Year of Publication | 2020 |
| Journal | submitted to a journal |
| Publisher | xx |