Browsing by Author "Demirors, Onur"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11

Citation - WoS: 8
Citation - Scopus: 15
Cross-Factor Analysis of Software Engineering Practices Versus Practitioner Demographics: an Exploratory Study in Turkey
(Elsevier Science inc, 2016) Garousi, Vahid; Coskuncay, Ahmet; Demirors, Onur; Yazici, Ali; Software Engineering; 06. School Of Engineering; 01. Atılım University
Context: Understanding the types of software engineering practices and techniques used in the industry is important. There is a wide spectrum in terms of the types and maturity of software engineering practices conducted in each software team and company. Furthermore, it is important to understand the cross-factor relationship of software engineering practices and practitioner demographics including their companies and projects, e.g., is it the case that practitioners developing software for sectors such as military would utilize software size measurement approaches more, or use different software development methodologies, compared to practitioners developing software for other sectors?, and what kinds of practices are conducted by practitioners in small versus large companies? Objective: Our objective is to get an understanding into the cross-factor correlation of various software engineering practices versus practitioner demographics including their companies and projects (e.g., target industry, size and work experience). Such an understanding will enable us to identify patterns and pinpoint special issues which should be studied and addressed in the context of each specific demographic (e.g., small versus large companies). Thus, we decided to conduct an exploratory study in this area and collected real industrial data in the context of Turkey which has a vibrant software industry. Method: To achieve the above objective, we use the data from a recent Turkish-wide survey of software engineering practices which was systematically designed with 46 questions based on our past experience in the Canadian context and using the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). 202 practicing software engineers participated in the survey. We raise a set of 12 research questions about the cross-factor correlation of software engineering practices and practitioner demographics, and address them using statistical analysis. Results: The exploratory study results reveal important and interesting findings about cross-factor relationship of software engineering practices and practitioner demographics. Among some of the most interesting findings are the followings: (1) By analyzing the trends, we were first surprised to see that as a practitioner gets more years of work experience, against what one would expect, s/he experiences more challenges in Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC) phases and SE tasks; (2) Almost 55% of participants measure software size; (3) Agile/lean development is used the least (16%) by the participants working in the companies serving the military and defense sector; (4) Usage of waterfall is low among participants employed by small sized companies whereas Agile/lean development is relatively popular among this class of participants; and (5) As company size increases, usage of spiral development slightly increases, whereas usage of extreme programming practices decreases. Conclusion: The results of this exploratory study will be useful to software engineering professionals and researchers both in Turkey and world-wide by revealing the cross-factor relationship of software engineering practices versus practitioner demographics. The study raises several new research directions, e.g., (1) Why are not many practitioners using any size nor project estimation metrics and how these fundamental engineering approaches could be utilized more frequently?, (2) What are the best practices, success stories and challenging experiences in using SE tools?, and (3) Why is Agile lean development is not popular in the military and defense sector and how these approaches could be utilized more frequently. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Citation - WoS: 3
Citation - Scopus: 4
Effort Prediction for Microservices: a Case Study
(Ieee, 2021) Unlu, Huseyin; Hacaloglu, Tuna; Leblebici, Onur; Demirors, Onur; Information Systems Engineering; 06. School Of Engineering; 01. Atılım University
Software size measurement is critical as an input to perform important project management processes such as effort, cost and schedule estimation. Functional size measurement (FSM) methods are beneficial in terms of being applicable in the early phases of the software life cycle over functional requirements and providing a systematic and repeatable method. However, in agile organizations, it can be challenging to seperate measurement components of FSM methods from requirements in the early phases as the documentation is kept to a minimum compared to traditional methods such as the Waterfall Model and is detailed as the project steps. In addition, the existing FSM methods are not fully compatible with today's architectural structures, which are from being data-driven and to evolve into a behaviour-oriented structure. In this study, we performed a case study which includes a project developed with agile methods and using microservice-based architecture to compare the effectiveness of COSMIC FSM and event-based software size measurement. For this purpose, we measured the size of the project and created effort estimation models based on two methods. The measurers had difficulty in applying both methods due to the limited detail level of the requirements in the project. However, the event-based method was found to estimate effort with less error than the COSMIC FSM method.
Citation - WoS: 3
Citation - Scopus: 6
An Exploratory Case Study Using Events as a Software Size Measure
(Springer, 2023) Hacaloglu, Tuna; Demirors, Onur; Information Systems Engineering; 06. School Of Engineering; 01. Atılım University
Software Size Measurement is a critical task in Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). It is the primary input for effort estimation models and an important measure for project control and process improvement. There exist various size measurement methods whose successes have already been proven for traditional software architectures and application domains. Being one of them, functional size measurement (FSM) attracts specific attention due to its applicability at the early phases of SDLC. Although FSM methods were successful on the data-base centric, transaction oriented stand-alone applications, in contemporary software development projects, Agile methods are highly used, and a centralized database and a relational approach are not used as before while the requirements suffer from a lack of detail. Today's software is frequently service based, highly distributed, message-driven, scalable and has unprecedented levels of availability. In the new era, event-driven architectures are appearing as one of the emerging approaches where the 'event' concept largely replaces the 'data' concept. Considering the important place of events in contemporary architectures, we focused on approaching the software size measurement problem from the event-driven perspective. This situation guided us to explore how useful event as a size measure in comparison to data-movement based methods. The findings of our study indicates that events can be promising for measurement and should be investigated further in detail to be formalized for creating a measurement model thereby providing a replicable approach.
Citation - WoS: 14
Citation - Scopus: 19
Measureability of Functional Size in Agile Software Projects: Multiple Case Studies With Cosmic Fsm
(Ieee, 2019) Hacaloglu, Tuna; Demirors, Onur; Information Systems Engineering; 06. School Of Engineering; 01. Atılım University
Functional size measurement (FSM) has been used in software engineering for decades as a main driver for estimation and significant input for other various project management activities throughout the project life span. To apply FSM accurately at the early stages of software development process, especially for estimation purposes, functional user requirements need to be available in detail as required by the adopted FSM method. However, in agile software development, requirement specifications, in general, are kept minimal. For this reason, the adjustment of the requirements to the necessary granularity level has been articulated as one of the barriers preventing the diffusion of FSM practices among agile teams. In this paper, we take a closer look at this problem in order to investigate the usability of FSM and to reveal FSM related challenges empirically through case studies on real agile projects from different software organizations. This study also provides a snapshot of agile organizations in terms of requirement specification and estimation related practices
Citation - WoS: 5
Citation - Scopus: 9
Modeling Cultures of the Embedded Software Industry: Feedback From the Field
(Springer Heidelberg, 2021) Akdur, Deniz; Say, Bilge; Demirors, Onur; Software Engineering; 06. School Of Engineering; 01. Atılım University
Engineering of modern embedded systems requires complex technical, managerial and operational processes. To cope with the complexity, modeling is a commonly used approach in the embedded software industry. The modeling approaches in embedded software vary since the characteristics of modeling such as purpose, medium type and life cycle phase differ among systems and industrial sectors. The objective of this paper is to detail the use of a characterization model MAPforES ("Modeling Approach Patterns for Embedded Software"). This paper presents the results of applying MAPforES in multiple case studies. The applications are performed in three sectors of the embedded software industry: defense and aerospace, automotive and transportation, and consumer electronics. A series of both structured and semi-structured interviews with 35 embedded software professionals were conducted as part of the case studies. The characterization model was successfully applied to these cases. The results show that identifying individual patterns provides insight for improving both individual behavior and the behavior of projects and organizations.
Citation - WoS: 2
On the Seven Misconceptions About Functional Size Measurement
(Ieee, 2016) Ozkan, Baris; Demirors, Onur; Information Systems Engineering; 06. School Of Engineering; 01. Atılım University
Among the various approaches to software size measurement, Functional Size Measurement has been widely recognized for its usability in early phases of software development cycles and its independence from implementation language, development method and technology. Starting from its introduction with the original Function Point Analysis method in 1979, functional size has been a favored input to estimation and productivity models. As a result of the search for solutions to emerging measurement needs and the advancements in the discipline of software measurement, FSM concepts have been redefined and measurement methods have matured with notable contributions from the ISO standardization process. Despite the progress towards an unambiguously defined and versatile measure in software engineering, several misconceptions about FSM in software community keep on leading to misuse of functional size and unproductive measurement practices. While such misperceptions results in disappointment and wasted resources, an important consequence is the disinterest in FSM. In this paper, we elaborate seven misconceptions in FSM. We review functional size and FSM by discussing the misconceptions. Our purpose is to give a state-of-the-art presentation of functional size and to guide software practitioners and researchers in applying FSM principles properly in their practices and software engineering methods and models.
Citation - WoS: 1
Citation - Scopus: 3
Pl Fsm: an Approach and a Tool for the Application of Fsm in Spl Environments
(Ieee, 2015) Eren, Onder; Ozkan, Baris; Demirors, Onur; Information Systems Engineering; 06. School Of Engineering; 01. Atılım University
In order to develop cost-efficient software it is crucial to measure the accurate software size. However; measuring the software size has up to now been almost entirely a manual process and, as such, is both time-consuming and prone to human error which can end up with time and money loss. Automation of this process is a must for the software developing companies to improve the quality of project and budget planning. This paper introduces a mapping between COSMIC concept elements and UML conceptual elements and an automation tool in order to capture the information needed for functional software size measurement from UML diagrams in a component based software product line environment (CBPL) that are structured in accordance with the interface based design (IbD) method. The mapping and the tool combined is called PL FSM. The results obtained by manual measurement and automated measurement are compared and the results are observed to be close. As a result of this study, PL FSM approach is validated in CBPL environment at the design stage of software development process. The case studies have been carried out in embedded systems domain.
Citation - WoS: 1
Citation - Scopus: 3
Predicting Software Functional Size Using Natural Language Processing: an Exploratory Case Study
(IEEE, 2024) Unlu, Huseyin; Tenekeci, Samet; Ciftci, Can; Oral, Ibrahim Baran; Atalay, Tunahan; Hacaloglu, Tuna; Demirors, Onur; Information Systems Engineering; 06. School Of Engineering; 01. Atılım University
Software Size Measurement (SSM) plays an essential role in software project management as it enables the acquisition of software size, which is the primary input for development effort and schedule estimation. However, many small and medium-sized companies cannot perform objective SSM and Software Effort Estimation (SEE) due to the lack of resources and an expert workforce. This results in inadequate estimates and projects exceeding the planned time and budget. Therefore, organizations need to perform objective SSM and SEE using minimal resources without an expert workforce. In this research, we conducted an exploratory case study to predict the functional size of software project requirements using state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). For this aim, we fine-tuned BERT and BERT_SE with a set of user stories and their respective functional size in COSMIC Function Points (CFP). We gathered the user stories included in different project requirement documents. In total size prediction, we achieved 72.8% accuracy with BERT and 74.4% accuracy with BERT_SE. In data movement-based size prediction, we achieved 87.5% average accuracy with BERT and 88.1% average accuracy with BERT_SE. Although we use relatively small datasets in model training, these results are promising and hold significant value as they demonstrate the practical utility of language models in SSM.
Citation - WoS: 5
Citation - Scopus: 8
Software Size Measurement: Bridging Research and Practice
(Ieee Computer Soc, 2024) Hacaloglu, Tuna; Unlu, Huseyin; Yildiz, Ali; Demirors, Onur; Information Systems Engineering; 06. School Of Engineering; 01. Atılım University
This study investigates the limited adoption of functional size measurement methods in the software development industry. Using insights from firms experienced in size measurement, it aims to uncover industry expectations and facilitate the translation of theoretical methodologies into practical applications.
Citation - WoS: 3
Citation - Scopus: 11
Towards Modeling Patterns for Embedded Software Industry: Feedback From the Field
(Ieee, 2018) Akdur, Deniz; Demirors, Onur; Say, Bilge; Software Engineering; 06. School Of Engineering; 01. Atılım University
The analysis, design, implementation and testing of software for embedded systems are not trivial. Software modeling is a commonly used approach in the embedded software industry to manage complexity of these phases. The modeling approaches vary since the characteristics of modeling such as its purpose, the medium type used, the lifecycle phase used, differ among systems and industrial sectors. Our previous research identified and defined the modeling approach patterns in embedded software development projects based on quantitative data. In this paper, to validate and improve the pre-investigated pattern set, we present a series of semi-structured interviews over eight months with 53 embedded software professionals across a variety of target industrial sectors and roles. With the help of these interviews, the different modeling approach patterns in embedded software development were better understood and the hidden patterns not evident in the previous study were identified along with a documentation of personalized modeling experiences.
Citation - WoS: 7
Citation - Scopus: 12
Utilization of Three Software Size Measures for Effort Estimation in Agile World: A Case Study
(IEEE, 2022) Unlu, Huseyin; Hacaloglu, Tuna; Buber, Fatma; Berrak, Kivilcim; Leblebici, Onur; Demirors, Onur; Information Systems Engineering; 06. School Of Engineering; 01. Atılım University
Functional size measurement (FSM) methods, by being systematic and repeatable, are beneficial in the early phases of the software life cycle for core project management activities such as effort, cost, and schedule estimation. However, in agile projects, requirements are kept minimal in the early phases and are detailed over time as the project progresses. This situation makes it challenging to identify measurement components of FSM methods from requirements in the early phases, hence complicates applying FSM in agile projects. In addition, the existing FSM methods are not fully compatible with today's architectural styles, which are evolving into event-driven decentralized structures. In this study, we present the results of a case study to compare the effectiveness of different size measures: functional -COSMIC Function Points (CFP)-, event-based - Event Points-, and code length-based - Line of Code (LOC)- on projects that were developed with agile methods and utilized a microservice- based architecture. For this purpose, we measured the size of the project and created effort estimation models based on three methods. It is found that the event-based method estimated effort with better accuracy than the CFP and LOC-based methods.