Motivation in software engineering is a complex topic. Cultural background is reported to be one of the factors moderating software engineers' motivation and project outcome. The authors conducted a... Show More

Motivation in software engineering is a complex topic. Cultural background is reported to be one of the factors moderating software engineers' motivation and project outcome. The authors conducted a survey with 36 software engineers from Finland to explore 1) the relationship between team motivation and project outcome, 2) factors that motivate Finnish engineers, and 3) how these motivational factors are related. The authors compare Finnish motivational factors with those identified in prior research. In addition they build a prediction model to identify the best indicators of team motivation for Finnish software engineers. Their results show that teamwork is the only culturally independent motivational factor. Having 1) a project manager with a clear vision (project manager vision) and 2) a project manager given full authority to manage the project (project manager authority) are also significant motivational factors among Finnish engineers. There are significant associations between some factors, e.g., customer involvement and staff appreciation. While these factors partially explain motivation in software engineering, cultural differences also play an active role in explaining team motivation. Their questionnaire needs to be updated to enable measurement of motivation for modern development practices such as agile development.

Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm, facilitated by the ease and scale of online connectivity, which harnesses the power of the crowds to solve problems and contribute knowledge. Crowdsourcing has... Show More

Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm, facilitated by the ease and scale of online connectivity, which harnesses the power of the crowds to solve problems and contribute knowledge. Crowdsourcing has been tried in practice and there are several commercial general-purpose crowdsourcing platforms on the web. Although the paradigm feasibility and impact have become evident, we still lack engineering methods and principles which aid the construction of quality crowdsourcing-based solutions. One of these aspects is the compatibility between the various configuration choices of the elements of a crowdsourcing project. In a previous work, the authors surveyed the literature and extracted a taxonomy of the various features which describes each of the four pillars of crowdsourcing: the crowd, the crowdsourcer, the crowdsourced task and the crowdsourcing platform. In this paper, the authors study the inter-relations between these features when configuring a crowdsourcing project. They start with an initial template and then confirm and enhance it by an expert study which involves 37 experts who applied crowdsourcing in practice and published research results. Their study helps crowdsourcers and crowdsourcing platform developers to better understand the several peculiarities that may arise by combining these features and thus assist them in the configuration of crowdsourcing projects with more awareness.

Testing applications with a graphical user interface (GUI) is an important, though challenging and time consuming task. The state of the art in the industry are still capture and replay tools, which... Show More

Testing applications with a graphical user interface (GUI) is an important, though challenging and time consuming task. The state of the art in the industry are still capture and replay tools, which may simplify the recording and execution of input sequences, but do not support the tester in finding fault-sensitive test cases and leads to a huge overhead on maintenance of the test cases when the GUI changes. In earlier works the authors presented the TESTAR tool, an automated approach to testing applications at the GUI level whose objective is to solve part of the maintenance problem by automatically generating test cases based on a structure that is automatically derived from the GUI. In this paper they report on their experiences obtained when transferring TESTAR in three different industrial contexts with decreasing involvement of the TESTAR developers and increasing participation of the companies when deploying and using TESTAR during testing. The studies were successful in that they reached practice impact, research impact and give insight into ways to do innovation transfer and defines a possible strategy for taking automated testing tools into the market.