“The quantum leap in software development speed by incrementally building and deploying software with real-time customer feedback will facilitate the speed and flexibility needed […]. Upon delivering the product or service, the focus shifts to creating incremental improvements, so that development cycles can be shortened, progress can be evaluated, and customer feedback and insight can be used to measure the value of the improvement and fed back to development in real-time.” [1]

There is a need in many software-based companies to evolve their software development practices towards continuous integration and continuous deployment. This allows a company to frequently and rapidly integrate and deploy their work and in consequence also opens opportunities for getting feedback from customers on a regular basis. Ideally, this feedback is used to support design decisions early in the development process, e.g., to determine which features should be maintained over time and which features should be skipped. In more general terms, the entire R&D system of an organization should be in a state where it is able to respond and act quickly based in instant customer feedback and where actual deployment of software functionality is seen as a way of fast experimenting and testing what the customer needs [2].

Experimentation refers here to fast validation of a business model or more specifically validating a value hypothesis. Reaching such a state of continuous experimentation implies a lot of challenges for organizations. Selected challenges are how to develop the “right” software while developing software “right”, how to have an appropriate tool infrastructure in place, how to measure and evaluate customer value, what are appropriate feedback systems, how to improve the velocity of software development, how to increase the business hit rate with new products and features, how to integrate such experiments into the development process, how to link knowledge about value for users or customers to higher-level goals of an organization. These challenges are quite new for many software-based organizations and not sufficiently understood from a software engineering perspective.

The goal of this seminar is to analyze existing approaches and experiences with respect to real time value delivery in software engineering, i.e., creating an R&D system that allows organizations to better decide what to develop and which strategies to follow. The students will get a comprehensive overview of modern experiment and feedback-driven software development.

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Seminar Paper Template

Seminar papers should be written using the IEEE conference template. Any writing tool can be used to write the paper as long as the outcome of the paper is PDF; IEEE templates are also offered in LaTex format for those interested. Download the template of your choosing, delete excess text from the template but preserve the format, input your information and start the graceful work of writing a paper.

EasyChair

Scientific conferences use conference platforms to facilitate the organization of conferences and manage paper submissions and anonymous reviews of program commitees. EasyChair is one of these platforms and this seminar will take advantage of conference services offered by EasyChair. Create an EasyChair account and log in to the 'Seminar on Real-time Value Delivery in Software Engineering' conference instance.

Moodle

The Moodle virtual learning environment is available for use during the course. Moodle adds a new layer of communication between students and staff as peer discussions are possible in discussion forums. Everyone can post messages in the discussion forum and there is a possibility to use the enivornment for other course activities as well.