Business process integration (BPI) is a crucial technique for supporting inter-organizational business interoperability. BPI allows automation of business processes and the integration of systems across numerous organizations. The integration of organizations' process models is one of the most addressed and used approach to achieve BPI. However, this model integration is complex and requires that designers have extensive experience in particular when organizations' business processes are incompatible. This paper considers the issue of modeling cross-organization processes out of a collection of organizations' private process models. To this end, we propose six adaptation patterns to resolve incompatibilities when combining organizations' processes. Each pattern is formalized with workflow net. © 2017 IEEE.

[Context:] Society increasingly values sustainable corporate behaviour, impacting corporate reputation and customer trust. Hence, companies regularly publish sustainability reports to shed light on their impact on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors. [Problem:] Sustainability reports are written by companies and therefore considered a company-controlled source. Contrarily, studies reveal that non-corporate channels (e.g., media coverage) represent the main driver for ESG transparency. However, analysing media coverage regarding ESG factors is challenging since (1) the amount of published news articles grows daily, (2) media coverage data does not necessarily deal with an ESG-relevant topic, meaning that it must be carefully filtered, and (3) the majority of media coverage data is unstructured. [Research Goal:] We aim to automatically extract ESG-relevant information from textual media reactions to calculate an ESG score for a given company. Our goal is to reduce the cost of ESG data collection and make ESG information available to the general public. [Contribution:] Our contributions are three-fold: First, we publish a corpus of 432,411 news headlines annotated as being environmental-, governance-, social-related, or ESG-irrelevant. Second, we present our tool-supported approach called ESG-Miner, capable of automatically analysing and evaluating corporate ESG performance headlines. Third, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach in an experiment and apply the ESG-Miner on 3000 manually labelled headlines. Our approach correctly processes 96.7% of the headlines and shows great performance in detecting environmental-related headlines and their correct sentiment. © 2023 IEEE.

Quality requirements, an important class of non functional requirements, are inherently difficult to elicit. Particularly challenging is the definition of good-enough quality. The problem cannot be avoided though, because hitting the right quality level is critical. Too little quality leads to churn for the software product. Excessive quality generates unnecessary cost and drains the resources of the operating platform. To address this problem, we propose to elicit the specific relationships between software quality levels and their impacts for given quality attributes and stakeholders. An understanding of each such relationship can then be used to specify the right level of quality by deciding about acceptable impacts. The quality-impact relationships can be used to design and dimension a software system appropriately and, in a second step, to develop service level agreements that allow re-use of the obtained knowledge of good-enough quality. This paper describes an approach to elicit such quality-impact relationships and to use them for specifying quality requirements. The approach has been applied with user representatives in requirements workshops and used for determining Quality of Service (QoS) requirements based the involved users’ Quality of Experience (QoE). The paper describes the approach in detail and reports early experiences from applying the approach. Index Terms-Requirement elicitation, quality attributes, non-functional requirements, quality of experience (QoE), quality of service (QoS).

Software product management (SPM) as a discipline includes many practices like product and release planning, market analysis, roadmapping, and product lifecycle management. Product management frameworks prescribe these practices but companies seldom adopt all of them. We conducted a state-of-practice survey with the aim to investigate how companies adopt SPM practices and how this practical experience fits together with the framework suggested by International Software Product Management Association (ISPMA). The results of this study showed that ISPMA SPM Framework describes core product management practices well but the impact of product management practices to the final product success remains ambiguous.

Context: New products create significant opportunities for differentiation and competitive advantage. To increase the chances of new product success, a universal set of critical activities and determinants have been recommended. Some researchers believe, however, that these factors are not universal, but are contextual. Objective: This paper reports innovation processes followed to develop three software intensive products for understanding how and why innovation practice is dependent on innovation context. Method: This paper reports innovation processes and practices with an in-depth multi-case study of three software product innovations from Ericsson, IBM, and Rorotika. It describes the actual innovation processes followed in the three cases and discusses the observed innovation practice and relates it to state-of-the-art. Results: The cases point to a set of contextual factors that influence the choice of innovation activities and determinants for developing successful product innovations. The cases provide evidence that innovation practice cannot be standardized, but is contextual in nature. Conclusion: The rich description of the interaction between context and innovation practice enables future investigations into contextual elements that influence innovation practice, and calls for the creation of frameworks enabling activity and determinant selection for a given context – since one size does not fit all.

This book gives a comprehensive overview on Software Product Management (SPM) for beginners as well as best practices, methodology and in-depth discussions for experienced product managers. This includes product strategy, product planning, participation in strategic management activities and orchestration of the functional units of the company. The book is based on the results of the International Software Product Management Association (ISPMA) which is led by a group of SPM experts from industry and research with the goal to foster software product management excellence across industries. This book can be used as textbook for ISPMA-based education and as guide for anybody interested in SPM as one of the most exciting and challenging disciplines in the business of software.

Platforms are emerging that allow data scientists, software and hardware engineers to collaborate through organisational boundaries to develop systems of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Such collaboration involves the exchange of assets representing Intellectual Property (IP) of the collaborators. The tension between permitting access and protecting IP is thus one of the critical challenges faced by organisations willing to innovate through collaboration. Licensing is a common way to address the issue, but the influence of the licensing rules on the intended form of collaboration is still unclear.In this paper, we identify and analyse the rules that are used to regulate IP exchanges in two common forms of collaboration: a) competitions where one customer benchmarks and selects among multiple suppliers and b) consortium projects where multiple parties collaborate to product joint results. Due to our interest in AI, we have chosen to analyse the terms and conditions of competitions hosted on KaggleTM a leading online platform for Competitions. For consortium projects, we have analysed the DESCA Consortium Agreement template. DESCA is often used for European projects, an increasing number of which are used to fund AI innovation projects. We have applied In Vivo Coding and Concept Coding coding techniques to highlight rules applicable to IP exchange. We structured the findings in the form of tree graphs consisting of interdependent textual phrases to extract, group and compare the terms and conditions of IP sharing in each collaboration form and how they relate to the characteristics of the studied collaborations.The results indicate that each form of collaboration has its own set of rules that address comparable concerns but have different content. Practitioners, both platform providers and collaborators, can utilise our results to implement licensing for IP exchange that fits the desired type of collaboration. For researchers, our results represent a step towards the automation of license generation and enforcement. © 2020 IEEE.

Flexibility is important for software organizations to cope with changes demanded in the business environment. So far, flexibility has been extensively studied from a software product and software development process point of view. However, there is little work on how to build flexibility at the level of the whole software organization. Thus, there is no clear understanding of how to effectively improve the ability of an organization to respond to changes in a timely fashion and with little effort. This paper presents the results of a grounded theory study on how flexibility is built and improved in an IT organization and provides a holistic and explanatory view of how this is achieved. Implications for research and practices are also provided.

In software engineering, the objective function of human decision makers might be influenced by many factors. Relying on historical data as the ground truth may give rise to systems that automate software engineering decisions by mimicking past suboptimal behavior. We describe the problem and offer some strategies. ©IEEE.

Offshore outsourcing is a common way of working, but sourcing collaborations do not always last, and sometimes vendors are switched. Vendor switching results in a complex form of relationship, in which the competing outgoing and incoming vendors are expected to cooperate. The success of such transitions highly depends on successful knowledge transfer and thus the willingness of the outgoing vendor to train their own replacement. While switching decisions have gained attention, the role of the vendor relationship is still relatively unexplored. In this paper, we report findings from a multi-case study of vendor switching in three projects based on 22 interviews with 27 interviewees. We developed a theoretical model explaining the complex interplay between the factors affecting such transitions. Our results confirm that opportunistic behavior of outgoing vendors is a probable threat. We found that the vendor relationship moderates the link between initial negative emotions and the opportunistic behavior of the outgoing vendor. Other important factors affecting the success of the transition include the relationship with the client, outgoing vendor's management engagement, and the cultural and organizational fit between vendors. We conclude with recommendations for companies switching vendors. © 2020 Elsevier Inc.