Several arguments support the proposition that corporations can be viewed as cognitive entities. But accepting that corporations perform cognitive functions raises questions about how we might describe and assess those functions. In this paper I propose that we can address such questions by viewing corporate cognition in terms of capabilities that are adapted from human cognition. To illustrate this idea, I use the concept of schemas, a human cognitive capability identified by Piaget, which I recast as a corporate cognitive capability. To develop this example, I review schemas as understood in psychology; use scenarios from corporate settings to motivate their relevance to corporations; and describe a hypothetical capability for corporate cognitive schemas using a template that addresses common concerns in enterprise capability modeling. This example gives support to the idea that cognitive capabilities are relevant on the corporate level. It shows that a corporate cognitive capabilities can be practically modeled like conventional business capabilities and that corporate cognitive capabilities can be related to business goals. This work points to a path for practical investigations and applications of a view of corporations as cognitive entities. It further opens a new domain for software process programming.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the idea that corporations can be regarded as artificial cognitive entities. Viewed as black boxes, corporations can be seen as widely and frequently regulated, regarded, and active in the same ways as conscious, thinking human beings. Viewed as white boxes, corporations can be seen to incorporate structures and functions analogous to those in the human mind that give rise to awareness and cognition, and they may possess other features that contribute to the realization of cognition in ways not found in humans. While there are certainly differences between humans and corporations in the basis and expression of cognition, the study of cognition in corporations is interesting and instructive and can be pursued as a field of inquiry in its own right. The relevance of software and systems process to corporate cognition is fundamental. Put directly, cognition is a process and corporate cognition is programmable. Thus, what we know from software engineering, process programming, and software and systems process engineering should be directly applicable to the programming (broadly construed) of corporate cognitive systems. An assessment framework such as CMMI (perhaps with a grounding on key cognitive capabilities) should remain broadly applicable to corporate cognitive processes and should serve as a guide to applying best practices in an organization. The study of corporations as artificial cognitive entities should lead to results of scientific interest and practical consequence in many areas, including codification and quantification of measures of corporate cognition, better understanding of corporate cognitive mechanisms, identification of best cognitive practices for corporations, broadening of the discipline of cognitive science, and opportunities for synergism with artificial intelligence applications in corporations. The results may be broadly applicable in society in areas of regulation; investing; employment; business contracting, mergers, and acquisitions; and with respect to ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) concerns.

The volume at hand presents the special issue of the 12th International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) 2019, which was held in Montreal, Canada, from May 25 to 26, 2019. ICSSP 2019 is the latest in a series of conferences that have been organized by the International Software and Systems Process Association. In our evolving landscape, many companies are making efforts to move towards new technologies and tools, agile principles, and continuous integration and delivery. In doing so, they find opportunity, flexibility, and strength in evolving towards hybrid processes, which are neither purely traditional nor can count as textbook agile. This special issue focuses on hybrid processes.

Informed projection is a technique for estimating work items created and completed for a software release. It combines counts of work items created and completed so far with models of items expected to be created and completed in the remaining schedule to yield projections of expected total items created and completed. Informed projection is not significantly more difficult to use than popular techniques like burn-down and burn-up charts but it overcomes limitations associated with those by accommodating variations in the total amount of work and in the rates of work creation and completion. Experiments confirm that simple models can yield relatively accurate projections fairly early in a release, that these models do not have to be unrealistically accurate, that effective models can be constructed simply, and that the approach works for projects with varied characteristics and patterns of work.

ABSTRACTSoftware process simulation (SPS) has been evolving over the past two decades after being introduced to the software engineering community in the 1980s. At that time the SPS technology attracted a great deal of interest from both academics and practitioners in the software process community—even to the extent of being one of the recommended techniques for achieving multiple Key Process Areas of Level 4 of the Capability Maturity Model Integration. However, in recent years, the growth of SPS seems to have slowed along with the number of reported applications in industry. This article summarizes the special panel that was held during ICSSP 2012 whose goals were to assess whether this technology remains applicable to today's software engineering projects and challenges and to point out the most beneficial opportunities for future research and industry application. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

If you take a broad view, there are many ways ahead for software process modeling and simulation. One way to broaden the view is to include not just software processes but also systems and service processes. Another is to address not just technical processes but also business processes. In any scope, impact can be strengthened by combining modeling and simulation with analytics. A way to assure longevity of the field is to solve problems in practice. These afford a variety of ways to make contributions, including both applied and fundamental. Challenges that must be overcome in achieving practical results are getting access to practitioners, acquiring useful data, and getting your solution adopted (among others). More empirical studies and experience reports are needed. But there are many routes by which contributions may flow to and from the field.

Coordination of project stakeholders is critical to timely and consistent software delivery. In this short paper we present the problem of private information as a guiding framework or lens through which to interpret coordination dynamics within software organizations. We provide evidence of this problem in the form of specific challenges, collected via interviews from a diverse set of extended (i.e., non-development) stakeholders in a globally distributed software development organization.

Integrated Product Development - IPD - is an enterprise-wide process used by IBM to develop technology products including hardware, software, and services. IPD has been in use at IBM for over a decade and has been very effective at increasing efficiency and reducing costs across the whole product life cycle. Within IBM Software Group, IPD at the top level is defined informally through natural-language documents, ad hoc diagrams, and a database of well-defined deliverables. Some key concepts in the SWG IPD definition include a clear statement of the principles on which the process is based, widespread references to business goals, frequent use of governance-oriented formulations, a clearly defined structure for the high levels of the process, a relative lack of concern about lower levels of the process structure, and an emphasis on the characterization of participant roles. The relative lack of formal and semantic rigor in the SWG IPD definition might seem to open the door to a number of problems in process specification and execution. However, this seems to have allowed the process definers to focus on those aspects of the process that are most important and to present those in a natural way. In the context of an organization that is dedicated to the success of the process, this has been an effective approach.

The modularity and customer centric approach of use cases make them the preferred methods for requirement elicitation, especially in iterative software development processes as in agile programming. Numerous guidelines exist for use case style and content, but enforcing compliance to such guidelines in the industry currently requires specialized training and a strongly managed requirement elicitation process. However, often due to aggressive development schedules, organizations shy away from such extensive processes and end up capturing use cases in an ad-hoc fashion with little guidance. This results in poor quality use cases that are seldom fit for any downstream software activities. We have developed an approach for automated and “edittime”inspection of use cases based on the construction and analysis of models of use cases. Our models contain linguistic properties of the use case text along with the functional properties of the system under discussion. In this paper, we present a suite of model analysis techniques that leverage such models to validate uses cases simultaneously for their style and content. Such model analysis techniques can be combined with a robust NLP techniques to develop integrated development environments for use case authoring, as we do in Text2Test.When used in an industrial setting, Text2Test resulted in better compliance of use cases, in enhanced productivity

Full-featured integrated development environments have become critical to the adoption of new programming languages. Key to the success of these IDEs is the provision of services tailored to the languages. However, modern IDEs are large and complex, and the cost of constructing one from scratch can be prohibitive. Generators that work from language specifications reduce costs but produce environments that do not fully reflect distinctive language characteristics. We believe that there is a practical middle ground between these extremes that can be effectively addressed by an open, semi-automated strategy to IDE development. This strategy is to reduce the burden of IDE development as much as possible, especially for internal IDE details, while opening opportunities for significant customizations to IDE services. To reduce the effort needed for customization we provide a combination of frameworks, templates, and generators. We demonstrate an extensible IDE architecture that embodies this strategy, and we show that this architecture can be used to produce customized IDEs, with a moderate amount of effort, for a variety of interesting languages.

Programming language design remains a vital field, with interest in languages targeting concurrency, scripting, and aspects, as well as in domain-specific languages. Full-featured integrated development environments (IDEs) have become critical to the adoption of new languages. A key factor in the success of these IDEs is the provision of services specifically tailored to the language. However, modern IDE frameworks are large and complex, and the cost of constructing a language-specific IDE from scratch remains prohibitive IMP is an IDE meta-tooling platform intended to relieve much of the burden of IDE development in Eclipse. IMP combines a language-independent framework, generators for partial implementations of language-specific services, and support for the completion of service implementations by programming at various levels of abstraction. Unlike much of the previous work, IMP permits signigicant customization of IDE appearance and behavior and accommodates incremental elaboration of the IDE; it also makes significant reuse of code and assists during the IDE development process. IMP-based IDEs are in use in research projects in IBM, including within IMP itself. IMP is available as an open-source release from SourceForge.net