Foreword by the Chairs

There is no doubt that agile methods have become mainstream and with their increased use unanswered questions start to appear: How do we address cross-cutting concerns when software is developed vertically? Does value prioritization lead to increases in technical debt by promoting feature development over refactoring? Isn’t the reticence to write initial specifications on the premise of change an invitation to unnecessary change? As agile development matures answers, albeit partial, responses start to appear. The recurring themes in this year presentations are not whether agile is good or bad, better or worse, but rather on how we answer some of these questions.

The Quality Aspects in Agile Methods Thematic Track 2016 includes in its final program four accepted full papers, which consider the topics of: release planning, business agility and quality, security and acceptance testing.

The first paper, Test Driven Development of Web Applications: a Lightweight Approach by Diego Clerissi et al present a method and toolset for the early generation of automated acceptance test cases for websites. In their proposal acceptance test cases are not something that is executed at the end to verify the functionality built but rather to guide the development process. Clerissi et al’s approach to automating acceptance test cases is based on screen mocking-up, a capture-recapture mechanism and an evolution loop, that extend and improves the test suite all of these critical to the implementation of Acceptance Test Driven Development.

In the second paper, Towards a Secure Agile Software Development Process, Hassan Adelyar and Alex Norta, discuss through four cases the implications of applying security principles to extreme programming concluding that their full application might result on the collapse of the development process.

The third paper, Being Business Agile Focusing on Flow Efficiency: Tale of a Practitioner’s approach by Gaetano Lombardi takes the reader through the journey of linking agile development practices to the largest business context in which they are embedded. Not surprisingly, the trip is not without perils.

The fourth paper, Agility and Quality Attributes in Open Source Software Projects Release Practices by Antonio Cesar Gomes da Silva et al is an indicator of the maturity achieved by agile development as it shows, not how agile practices are influenced by other praxis but how agile can inform other contexts.

In summary, the four papers selected for this track offer answers, some more specific, some more general to the problems encountered in the field by practitioners and researches that wander off the happy path. 

Track Committee

Chair: Eduardo Miranda, CMU, USA

Co-chair: João M. Fernandes, U.Minho, Portugal

Program Committee:

Ademar Aguiar, U Porto, Portugal
Francisco José Duarte, Bosch, Portugal
Glauco Carneiro, U Salvador, Brazil
Jouni Markkula, U Oulu, Finland
Jürgen Münch, U Reutlingen, Germany & U Helsinki, Finland
Krzysztof Wnuk, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden

Call for papers:

Agile methods have gained popularity due to their ability to cope with unstable requirements throughout the development life cycle. They improve communication amongst developers and customers, and allow one to deliver products in shorter time frames, with more constrained budgets, when compared to traditional development methods. However, the real impact of agility in quality is an open issue. Although agility has earned support from many researchers and practitioners, the evidence provided by those supporters to back up their claims has yet to convince those that are skeptic about the advantages of agility. The ICT systems community would benefit from compelling evidences with respect to the contexts in which agility is a good option (and those where a more traditional approach is more advisable), and to the effects of agility in software quality. We seek contributions that are related to the impact of agility in the quality of ICT systems.

Suggested topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

• agile versus traditional quality management

• agile web development

• agile software quality assurance activities

• agile quality trends

• agile quality improvements

• agility in the context of complex/long-lived ICT systems

• empirical evaluation on evidence concerning the effect of agility in quality

• evaluation of the quality assurance activities and practices in the context of agile methods

• evidence and “reports from the trenches” concerning the Agile Manifesto and its impact on ICT systems quality

• quality metrics for agile project management

• tools for agile methods

Submission process:

Authors should submit to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=quatic2016 a PDF version of their paper. Full Papers must be in CPS format and not exceed 6 pages, including figures, references, and appendices. Work In Progress (WIP) works with relevant preliminary results are limited to 3 pages. Submissions must be original and will be reviewed by the Track Program Committee. Accepted papers will be included in the electronic proceedings of QUATIC’2016 published by Conference Publishing Services (CPS),  submitted for archiving in Xplore and CSDL, and submitted for indexing in ISI Web of Science, SCOPUS, ACM Portal, DBLP and DOI System, subject to one of the authors registering for the conference. The authors of the best papers of this thematic track will be invited to submit extended versions to the main track of the conference.

Important dates:

• Paper submission: Sunday, April 17, May 15, 2016

• Author's notifications: Sunday, May 15, June 12, 2016

• Camera ready submission: Sunday, June 19, June 26, 2016

Previous Edition:

See details of the QUATIC 2014 edition of this track.