Browsing by Author "Ruhe, Guenther"
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Article Citation Count: 20A BIBLIOMETRIC/GEOGRAPHIC ASSESSMENT OF 40 YEARS OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING RESEARCH (1969-2009)(World Scientific Publ Co Pte Ltd, 2013) Garousi, Vahid; Ruhe, Guenther; Software EngineeringBibliometric rankings are quite common in the field of software engineering. For example, there are a series of ranking repeated every year which identify the top researchers and institutions at the international level in the field. There are also other studies to determine the most cited articles in software engineering journals, the most popular research topics in this area, or identify the top researchers and institutions in regional levels. However, there exists no existing bibliometric quantitative analysis of publications in the area of software engineering (SE), including relative and absolute growth in the number of all SE publications as well as an analysis among countries. This is the main goal and motivation of this article. Besides, this study intends to provide an overall quantitative trend of the software engineering papers, and compare that trend to research output in other areas of science. The bibliometric study reported in this paper is motivated by the fact that understanding the amount of geographical research contributions to the field of software engineering can help identify different countries' level of commitment to support research activities in this area over years. We analyze how the contribution levels of top-ranked countries have changed over the years and how SE compares to other disciplines of engineering and science. Among the most interesting findings of this study are: (1) Over 40 years, in total about 60% of the SE literature has been contributed by only 7% of all countries, (2) the SE research output of different countries does not necessarily correlate with their GDPs, (3) the share of contributions to the SE discipline by the American researchers has declined from 71.43% ( in 1980) to 14.90% ( in 2008), and ( 4) China is the country with the biggest share growth in the number of publications ( from 0.82% of the entire SE publications in 1991 to 13.82% in 2009).Article Citation Count: 69Cost, benefits and quality of software development documentation: A systematic mapping(Elsevier Science inc, 2015) Garousi, Vahid; Garousi-Yusifoglu, Vahid; Sun, Bo; Garousi, Golara; Shahnewaz, Shawn; Ruhe, Guenther; Software EngineeringContext: Software documentation is an integral part of any software development process. Researchers and practitioners have expressed concerns about costs, benefits and quality of software documentation in practice. On the one hand, there is a lack of a comprehensive model to evaluate the quality of documentation. On the other hand, researchers and practitioners need to assess whether documentation cost outweighs its benefit. Objectives: In this study, we aim to summarize the existing literature and provide an overview of the field of software documentation cost, benefit and quality. Method: We use the systematic-mapping methodology to map the existing body of knowledge related to software documentation cost, benefit and quality. To achieve our objectives, 11 Research Questions (RQ) are raised. The primary papers are carefully selected. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, our study pool included a set of 69 papers from 1971 to 2011. A systematic map is developed and refined iteratively. Results: We present the results of a systematic mapping covering different research aspects related to software documentation cost, benefit and quality (RQ1-11). Key findings include: (1) validation research papers are dominating (27 papers), followed by solution proposals (21 papers). (2) Most papers (61 out of 69) do not mention the development life-cycle model explicitly. Agile development is only mentioned in 6 papers. (3) Most papers include only one "System under Study" (SUS) which is mostly academic prototype. The average number of participants in survey-based papers is 106, the highest one having approximately 1000 participants. (4) In terms of focus of papers, 50 papers focused on documentation quality, followed by 37 papers on benefit, and 12 papers on documentation cost. (5) The quality attributes of documentation that appear in most papers are, in order: completeness, consistency and accessibility. Additionally, improved meta-models for documentation cost, benefit and quality are also presented. Furthermore, we have created an online paper repository of the primary papers analyzed and mapped during this study. Conclusion: Our study results show that this research area is emerging but far from mature. Firstly, documentation cost aspect seems to have been neglected in the existing literature and there are no systematic methods or models to measure cost. Also, despite a substantial number of solutions proposed during the last 40 years, more and stronger empirical evidences are still needed to enhance our understanding of this area. In particular, what we expect includes (1) more validation or evaluation studies; (2) studies involving large-scale development projects, or from large number of study participants of various organizations; (3) more industry-academia collaborations; (4) more estimation models or methods to assess documentation quality, benefit and, especially, cost. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Conference Object Citation Count: 40Usage and usefulness of technical software documentation: An industrial case study(Elsevier, 2015) Garousi, Vahid; Garousi-Yusifoglu, Vahid; Ruhe, Guenther; Zhi, Junji; Moussavi, Mahmoud; Smith, Brian; Software EngineeringContext: Software documentation is an integral part of any software development process. However, software practitioners are often concerned about the value, degree of usage and usefulness of documentation during development and maintenance. Objective: Motivated by the needs of NovAtel Inc. (NovAtel), a world-leading company developing software systems in support of global navigation satellite systems, and based on the results of a former systematic mapping study, we aimed at better understanding of the usage and the usefulness of various technical documents during software development and maintenance. Method: We utilized the results of a former systematic mapping study and performed an industrial case study at NovAtel. From the joint definition of the analysis goals, the research method incorporates qualitative and quantitative analysis of 55 documents (design, test and process related) and 1630 of their revisions. In addition, we conducted a survey on the usage and usefulness of documents. A total of 25 staff members from the industrial partner, all having a medium to high level of experience, participated in the survey. Results: In the context of the case study, a number of findings were derived. They include that (1) technical documentation was consulted least frequently for maintenance purpose and most frequently as an information source for development, (2) source code was considered most frequently as the preferred information source during software maintenance, (3) there is no significant difference between the usage of various documentation types during both development and maintenance, and (4) initial hypotheses stating that up-to-date information, accuracy and preciseness have the highest impact on usefulness of technical documentation. Conclusions: It is concluded that the usage of documentation differs for various purposes and it depends on the type of the information needs as well as the tasks to be completed (e.g., development and maintenance). The results have been confirmed to be helpful for the company under study, and the firm is currently implementing some of the recommendations given. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.