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Software Specification and Documentation in Continuous Software Development: A Focus Group Report

Authors:

U. Van Heesch,

T. Theunissen,

O. Zimmermann,

U. ZdunAuthors Info & Claims

EuroPLoP '17: Proceedings of the 22nd European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

Article No.: 35, Pages 1 - 13

https://doi.org/10.1145/3147704.3147742

Published: 12 July 2017 Publication History

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Abstract

We have been observing an ongoing trend in the software engineering domain towards development practices that rely heavily on verbal communication and small, closely-interacting teams. Among others, approaches like Scrum, Lean Software Development, and DevOps fall under this category. We refer to such development practices as Continuous Software Development (ConSD). Some core principles of ConSD are working in short iterations with frequent delivery, striving for an optimal balance between effectiveness and efficiency, and amplify learning in the development team. In such a context, many traditional patterns of software specification, documentation and knowledge preservation are not applicable anymore.

To explore relevant topics, opinions, challenges and chances around specification, documentation and knowledge preservation in ConSD, we conducted a workshop at the 22nd European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (EuroPLoP), held in Germany in July 2017. The workshop participants came from the industry and academia.

In this report, we present the results of the workshop. Among others, we elaborate on the difference between specification and documentation, the special role of architecture in ConSD in general, and architecture decision documentation in particular, and the importance of tooling that combines aspects of development, project management, and quality assurance. Furthermore, we describe typical issues with documentation and identify means to efficiently and effectively organize specification and documentation tasks in ConSD.

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Carvalho LColanzi TAssunção WGarcia APereira JKalinowski Mde Mello Rde Lima MLucena C(2024)On the Usefulness of Automatically Generated Microservice ArchitecturesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.336120950:3(651-667)Online publication date: Mar-2024
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Khan HAfsar WNazir SNoor AKundi MMaashi MAlshahrani H(2023)Revolutionizing software developmental processes by utilizing continuous software approachesThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-023-05818-880:7(9579-9608)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2023
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Index Terms

Software Specification and Documentation in Continuous Software Development: A Focus Group Report
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Patterns

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Published In

EuroPLoP '17: Proceedings of the 22nd European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

July 2017

566 pages

ISBN:9781450348485

DOI:10.1145/3147704

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 12 July 2017

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EuroPLoP '17

EuroPLoP '17: European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

July 12 - 16, 2017

Irsee, Germany

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EuroPLoP '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 34 of 53 submissions, 64%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 216 of 354 submissions, 61%

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Carvalho LColanzi TAssunção WGarcia APereira JKalinowski Mde Mello Rde Lima MLucena C(2024)On the Usefulness of Automatically Generated Microservice ArchitecturesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.336120950:3(651-667)Online publication date: Mar-2024
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Specification in Continuous Software Development

A mapping study on documentation in Continuous Software Development

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