Organizational and management Issues: Are we there yet?

Mansour Zand

Computer Science Dept.

College of Information and Science Technology

245 Durham Science Center

University Of Nebraska - Omaha

Omaha NE, 68182-0500

Tel: (402)554-2847, fax: (402)554-2975

E-mail zand@unomaha.edu

Reuse practice has a great potential, far more of many other on-going activities in software, to re-structure the organization of software development shops, thus management and organization of these departments are to be reconsidered in the context of the entire organization rather than by itself.

Most of the "reuser" from different point of view agrees on one item: component based software engineering and development is major breakthrough in this process. However, there is a debate on focusing on component development or rather to emphasize on integration of existing components.

The majority of published works by practitioners are from those from large software shops with adequate resources. Moreover, most of the reports are success stories and those software shops that have not been as successful, are not very much forthcoming to describe what have gone wrong. Another major shortcoming of the research in reuse community is the lack of adequate work to address the need of small and medium sized software shops. Obviously, managers and software developers in most of these shops do not have comparebale resources and privilages of major software shops to take advantage of the outcome R&D reported. There are very few reports on how small/medium sized software shops have benefited from ongoing R&D and how their needs are different from the large scale software shop non-technical issues.

Software development is bound to be changed drastically, if it is not already done in some of the software shops. There are a large number of overnight success stories on those software companies that have capitalized on the new technologies. Most of those companies have deliberately or were forced to restructure and reorganize their companies to gain the maximum reward of the technologies.

One of the major obstacles on the development and use of reusable software components is lack of a clear organizational strategy. A large number of organizations don’t provide necessary support for reuse-oriented projects as soon as budgetary problems are surfacing. The reported success stories on reuse projects normally indicate presence of an organizational-wide support. Organizations that lack a plan for systematic reuse, do not have a holistic system development, and lack the knowledge of long-term organizational strategic advantage may only benefit from partial success of software reuse [SSR97]. Also, small and medium sized software shops that have not been very much successful in taking advantage of reuse at large and the have been unable to develop a more practical approach that can used by the similar software shops.

There has been a lot of emphasis on the establishing of reuse culture in organizations. Nevertheless, very few works have been published and most of them are now obsolete. New studies on instituting of reuse culture should investigate the impact of Internet resources, ramification of distributed organizations (i.e., multi site organizations), and recent software engineering and specifically reuse paradigms [SSR97].

The practical benefits of practical component based software engineering and development will force the software development organizations to adapt their engineering and development process [Brown98]. This transformation will have the most profound impact on organization and management of software shops. The growth of number and production of software houses and component brokers results in dependency of the "system" builders on the off-the-shelve and ready-made components. Consequently, there will be a shift in distribution of skills, management styles, and hence in organization of future software shops. The impact of this trend on training and re-education of software engineers/programmers should be investigated. Proper modification on informal and formal education programs should be arranged.

The ramifications of cultural background are not entirely understood. It is not clear how much cultural and socioeconomic differences across the glob may impact a software development shop that has different branches in different continents. Can we rely on the might of technology to force its solution or should pay more attention on "management" solutions? Obviously, many of studies and solutions for hardware industry are not applicable to software industry. Software development is much more human intensive than hardware factory and cultural and socieconomical factors should be given much higher weight.

We need to closely look at the non-traditional software shops, software houses, and component developers. and learn from their success and failure to re-structure their organization around the new technology. There is an immediate need to study include the impacts of the instituting reuse-at-large and systematic reuse on resources (explicitly human resources), management, inter and intra organization communication process, etc. There is a belief that technology will find its way and force the necessary adjustment. This is a passive view. If we do not study the strength and course of the stream, we may go down with the stream rather than ride on it [SSR97].

Mansour K. Zand is an Associate Professor in Department of Computer Science in College of Information Science & Technology in University of Nebraska. His main areas of research are in software engineering, specifically software reuse. His most recent work on this area is on organizational impacts of software reuse, legal issues, and fuzzy metrics. He is also involved in research in database area specifically object oriented and data warehousing.

Mansour Zand is the co-founder of ACM-SIGSOFT symposium on Software Reusability (SSR). He was the General Chair of SSR'95 and currently is member of the Steering Committee of SSR'99.