A database for publications published by researchers and students at SimulaMet.
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- Journal articles (34)
- Books (2)
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- Book chapters (5)
- Talks, keynote (9)
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Proceedings, refereed
Gender Equality in Information Technology Processes: A Systematic Mapping Study
In Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC 2023), 2023.Status: Accepted
Gender Equality in Information Technology Processes: A Systematic Mapping Study
Information Technology (IT) plays a key role in the world we live in. As such, its relation to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) stated by the United Nations to improve lives and health of the people and the planet is inexorable. In particular, the SDG 5 aims to enforce gender equality and states 9 Targets that drive the actions to achieve such goal. The lack of women within IT has been a concern for several years. In this context, the objective of this study is to get an overview of the state of the art on gender equality in IT processes. To do so, we conducted a Systematic Mapping Study to investigate the addressed Targets, challenges, and potential best practices that have been put forward so far. The results we have obtained demonstrate the novelty of this field, as well as a set of opportunities and challenges that currently exist in this regard, such as the lack of best practices to address gender equality in IT processes and the need to develop proposals that solve this problem. All of this can be used as a starting point to identify open issues that help to promote research on this field and promote and enhance best practices towards a more socially sustainable basis for gender equality in and by IT.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Proceedings, refereed |
| Year of Publication | 2023 |
| Conference Name | Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC 2023) |
| Keywords | Gender Equality, information technology, Processes, sustainability, Systematic Mapping Study |
Projects VS Continuous Product Development - Does it Affect Benefits Realization?
In The Ninth International Conference on Advances and Trends in Software Engineering (SOFTENG), 2023.Status: Accepted
Projects VS Continuous Product Development - Does it Affect Benefits Realization?
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management, EDOS: Effective Digitalization of Public Sector |
| Publication Type | Proceedings, refereed |
| Year of Publication | 2023 |
| Conference Name | The Ninth International Conference on Advances and Trends in Software Engineering (SOFTENG) |
Proceedings, refereed
Research Incentives in Academia Leading to Unethical Behavior
In Research Challenges in Information Science. Vol. 446. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022.Status: Published
Research Incentives in Academia Leading to Unethical Behavior
A current practice in academia is to reward researchers for achieving outstanding performance. Although intended to boost productivity, such a practice also promotes competitiveness and could lead to unethical behavior. This position paper exposes common misconducts that arise when researchers try to game the system. It calls the research community to take preventive actions to reduce misconduct and treat such a pervasive environment with proper acknowledgment of researchers’ efforts and rewards on quality rather than quantity.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Proceedings, refereed |
| Year of Publication | 2022 |
| Conference Name | Research Challenges in Information Science |
| Volume | 446 |
| Pagination | 744 - 751 |
| Date Published | 05/2022 |
| Publisher | Springer International Publishing |
| Place Published | Cham |
| ISBN Number | 978-3-031-05759-5 |
| ISSN Number | 1865-1348 |
| Keywords | Incentives, Misconduct, Research ethics, Research quality, Researcher performance |
| Notes | Part of the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing book series (LNBIP,volume 446) |
| URL | https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-05760-1_51 |
| DOI | 10.1007/978-3-031-05760-1_51 |
Perceived Challenges in Benefits Management - A Study of Public Sector Information Systems Engineering Projects
In Conference on Business Informatics (CBI). 24th ed. IEEE Computer Society Digital Library, 2022.Status: Published
Perceived Challenges in Benefits Management - A Study of Public Sector Information Systems Engineering Projects
The field of benefits management gives guidelines on how to plan and realize benefits throughout the life-cycle of a system. However, realizing benefits from information systems projects has proven to be challenging in practice. In this paper, we investigate specific benefits management challenges as perceived by practitioners involved in information systems engineering projects. We conducted 22 interviews with respondents representing nine public sector projects, where challenges in managing benefits were elicited and identified. We elicited six specific benefits management challenges: A - Identifying and describing benefits, B - Alignment of work with planned benefits, C - Reception and acceptance of the planned benefits, D - Organizational issues, E - Alternative or competing solutions, F - Measuring and evaluating benefits. Overlaying these challenges with current normative models on benefits management, we find that: 1. Normative models on benefits management lack sufficient guidance on operative work on how to create information systems fit for realizing benefits and how to introduce these solutions to ensure benefits realization, and 2. Normative models on benefits management do not explicitly leverage the rapid project learning promoted by modern engineering methods. We conclude that more specific benefits management models should be elaborated, which are integrated into modern information systems engineering practices. This will enable best practices on the continuous adjustments of cost and scope according to evolving knowledge in projects to also be adapted to the management of benefits.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management, EDOS: Effective Digitalization of Public Sector |
| Publication Type | Proceedings, refereed |
| Year of Publication | 2022 |
| Conference Name | Conference on Business Informatics (CBI) |
| Edition | 24 |
| Pagination | 156-165 |
| Date Published | 06/2022 |
| Publisher | IEEE Computer Society Digital Library |
| Keywords | Benefits management challenges, Benefits management models, Information systems engineering, Public sector |
| DOI | 10.1109/CBI54897.2022.00024 |
Benefit Considerations in Project Decisions
In International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2022. 23th ed. Springer, Cham, 2022.Status: Published
Benefit Considerations in Project Decisions
Software project success is often characterized in terms of time, cost and scope – despite that delivering benefit is the main purpose of a project. In this paper, we explore 1) to what degree benefit considerations influence major project decisions, 2) to what degree a specific set of benefits management challenge are handled and influence major project decisions and 3) if there is any realization (over time) that benefit considerations should receive greater attention. We investigate influence in projects with four types of problem severity: completed projects with only minor problems, completed projects with major problems, projects that were disrupted but completed, and projects that were terminated before completion. We asked 45 software professionals to what degree time, cost, scope, benefit and benefit/cost, as well as benefits management challenges, influence major roject decisions. Our findings indicate that time, cost and scope have a significantly higher degree of influence on project decisions than benefit and benefit/cost. However, practitioners think that benefit and benefit/cost should have significantly more influence on decisions than cost. The benefits management challenges are found to have less influence in the more severe projects. We argue that giving benefits considerations a stronger voice in project decisions would be in line with the desire of practitioners and the prime objective of delivering benefit to stakeholders. We conclude that it is important to understand how to handle benefits management challenges at different stages of project life and that handling such challenges should be integrated with other prime drivers of project success.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management, EDOS: Effective Digitalization of Public Sector |
| Publication Type | Proceedings, refereed |
| Year of Publication | 2022 |
| Conference Name | International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2022 |
| Edition | 23 |
| Pagination | 217-234 |
| Date Published | 11/2022 |
| Publisher | Springer, Cham |
| ISBN Number | 978-3-031-21388-5 |
| Keywords | Benefit, Benefits management challenges, Cost, Scope, Software project severity, Time |
| DOI | 10.1007/978-3-031-21388-5_15 |
Measurement of software development effort estimation bias: Avoiding biased measures of estimation bias
In 11th International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications (SEA 2022). SEA, 2022.Status: Published
Measurement of software development effort estimation bias: Avoiding biased measures of estimation bias
In this paper, we propose improvements in how estimation bias, e.g., the tendency towards under-estimating the effort, is measured. The proposed approach emphasizes the need to know what the estimates are meant to represent, i.e., the type of estimate we evaluate and the need for a match between the type of estimate given and the bias measure used. We show that even perfect estimates of the mean effort will not lead to an expectation of zero estimation bias when applying the frequently used bias measure: (actual effort – estimated effort)/actual effort. This measure will instead reward under-estimates of the mean effort. We also provide examples of bias measures that match estimates of the mean and the median effort, and argue that there are, in general, no practical bias measures for estimates of the most likely effort. The paper concludes with implications for the evaluation of bias of software development effort estimates.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Proceedings, refereed |
| Year of Publication | 2022 |
| Conference Name | 11th International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications (SEA 2022) |
| Publisher | SEA |
Proceedings, refereed
Preliminary Evaluation of a Survey Checklist in the Context of Evidence-based Software Engineering Education.
In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2021). SciTePress – Science and Technology Publications, 2021.Status: Published
Preliminary Evaluation of a Survey Checklist in the Context of Evidence-based Software Engineering Education.
Background: In order to judge evidence it is important to be able to assess study quality. Checklists are means to objectify the assessment. In an earlier study we proposed and evaluated a checklist for surveys, which was assessed by experts.
Objective: (1) To assess whether the use of the checklist enables students with limited experience in research to consistently and accurately assess the quality of a research paper. (2) To elicit qualitative feedback to identify improvements to the checklist.
Method: The students reviewed a survey in a one-group posttest-only quasi-experiment using the checklist. In total 13 students participated in the context of the course Evidence-based software engineering as part of the study program Information Systems at Flensburg University of Applied Sciences.
Results: In total the students achieved 74% percent of agreement among each other. However, the Kappa values indicated mostly a poor level of agreement considering the classification by Fleiss. In addition, the students were quite inaccurate assessing the questions. Though, they performed well on questions for research objectives and the identification of population.
Conclusion: Findings indicate that students do not assess reliably. However, further investigations are needed to substantiate the findings.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Proceedings, refereed |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Conference Name | Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2021) |
| Pagination | 437–444 |
| Date Published | 04/2021 |
| Publisher | SciTePress – Science and Technology Publications |
| Keywords | Checklist, One-group Quasi-experiment, Students, survey |
Team resource management decisions in software development projects
In IEEE 23rd Conference on Business Informatics (CBI) . IEEE, 2021.Status: Published
Team resource management decisions in software development projects
Purpose: This paper examines to what extent resource managers are likely to make normatively correct decisions in complex, but realistic, software development team resource management situations.
Research design: Three scenarios were designed, all of them with a software development project consisting of a higher and a lower productivity team. The resource managers were asked to decide which team to increase (or decrease) the productivity by 10% in order to minimize the total effort or the total duration of the software project. Ninety-nine software professionals, most of them with substantial resource management experience, were randomly allocated one of the scenarios.
Findings: Most of the resource managers perceived their scenario as realistic and occurring in practice. The decisions tended, however, to be different from the normatively correct ones. In particular, when the scenario structure resembled that used to document a time-saving bias, the great majority of the managers made non-normative decisions. The findings suggest that the resource managers made decisions based on simple heuristics, often leading to non-normative decisions. When asked about the decisions they would make in practice, more of the resource managers gave normatively correct responses. Our findings suggest a cost-saving potential from more awareness of how to make team resource management decisions.
Originality: The study may be the first to document non-normative team resource decisions, including those related to the time-saving bias, in the context of project management.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Proceedings, refereed |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Conference Name | IEEE 23rd Conference on Business Informatics (CBI) |
| Publisher | IEEE |
Relations Between Effort Estimates, Skill Indicators, and Measured Programming Skill (A Journal first conference publication)
In CM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE). ACM, 2021.Status: Published
Relations Between Effort Estimates, Skill Indicators, and Measured Programming Skill (A Journal first conference publication)
There are large skill differences among software developers, and clients and managers will benefit from being able to identify those with better skill. This study examines the relations between low effort estimates, and other commonly used skill indicators, and measured programming skill. One hundred and four professional software developers were recruited. After skill-related information was collected, they were asked to estimate the effort for four larger and five smaller programming tasks. Finally, they completed a programming skill test. The lowest and most over-optimistic effort estimates for the larger tasks were given by those with the lowest programming skill, which is in accordance with the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect. For the smaller tasks, however, those with the lowest programming skill had the highest and most over-pessimistic estimates. The other programming skill indicators, such as length of experience, company assessed skill and self-assessed skill, were only moderately correlated with measured skill and not particularly useful in guiding developer skill identification. A practical implication is that for larger and more complex tasks, the use of low effort estimates and commonly used skill indicators as selection criteria leads to a substantial risk of selecting among the least skilled developers.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | Department of IT Management |
| Publication Type | Proceedings, refereed |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Conference Name | CM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) |
| Publisher | ACM |
Relations Between Effort Estimates, Skill Indicators, and Measured Programming Skill
In ESEC/FSE. Journal First publication (IEEE TSE), 2021.Status: Published
Relations Between Effort Estimates, Skill Indicators, and Measured Programming Skill
There are large skill differences among software developers, and clients and managers will benefit from being able to identify those with better skill. This study examines the relations between low effort estimates, and other commonly used skill indicators, and measured programming skill. One hundred and four professional software developers were recruited. After skill-related information was collected, they were asked to estimate the effort for four larger and five smaller programming tasks. Finally, they completed a programming skill test. The lowest and most over-optimistic effort estimates for the larger tasks were given by those with the lowest programming skill, which is in accordance with the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect. For the smaller tasks, however, those with the lowest programming skill had the highest and most over-pessimistic estimates. The other programming skill indicators, such as length of experience, company assessed skill and self-assessed skill, were only moderately correlated with measured skill and not particularly useful in guiding developer skill identification. A practical implication is that for larger and more complex tasks, the use of low effort estimates and commonly used skill indicators as selection criteria leads to a substantial risk of selecting among the least skilled developers.
| Afilliation | Software Engineering |
| Project(s) | EDOS: Effective Digitalization of Public Sector |
| Publication Type | Proceedings, refereed |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Conference Name | ESEC/FSE |
| Publisher | Journal First publication (IEEE TSE) |