Melissa Wen · Melissa Wen · Leonardo Leite
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opensym2017/content/11-lessons.tex
opensym2017/content/12-conclusion.tex
 \section{Lessons Learned}
 \label{sec:lessons}
-\textbf{How to involve students real-world projects, interacting with
+\textbf{How to involve students in real-world projects, interacting with
 real customers.}
 %
 Our team was mainly composed of software engineering undergraduate
-student, who had the opportunity to interact with senior developers and
-designers inside the team, as well as with the team of technicians and
+students, who had the opportunity to interact with senior developers and
+designers on the team, as well as with the team of technicians and
 managers from the Brazilian Government, and the management team from
 UnB.
 %
-They interacted with professionals that had diverse expertises, and were
+The students interacted with professionals of diverse fields of expertise, and they were
 able to participate in all levels of the software development process.
-This contributed to a great learning opportunity, and for a majority of
-them this was their first professional experience.
+This contributed to a great learning opportunity. Moreover, for the majority of
+the students, this was a first professional experience.
 \textbf{The participation of experienced professionals is crucial to
-success of the project.}
+the success of the project.}
 One important factor for the students was the composition of the teams
 with the participation of experienced professionals.
 %
@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ pressure.
 %
 On the management side, the active participation of professors -- who
 are, in the end, the ones responsible for the project -- is crucial to
-make sure student participation is conducted in a healthy way, and is an
+make sure students participation is conducted in a healthy way, and it is an
 instance of leading by example.
 \textbf{A balanced relationship between academia and industry.}
@@ -47,66 +47,66 @@ And even under a potentially adverse environment, the project delivered
 the desired solution with success.
 %
 At the end of the project, we noted that the skills developed by the
-students were at the state of art of the software engineering practice.
+students were at the software engineering state of the art.
 After the project ended, we had team members successfully embracing
-opportunities in public, private, national and international
-organizations, in addition to those students that went into
-entrepreneurship and opened their own companies.
+opportunities in public, private, national, and international
+organizations, in addition to those students that
+opened their own companies.
 \textbf{Managing different organizational cultures.}
 In the beginning of the project, the Brazilian Government stakeholders
-had certain expectations about the development of project that, let's
-say, didn't exactly match our work based on agile and FOSS practices.
+had certain expectations about the project development that, let's
+say, didn't exactly match our work style based on agile and FOSS practices.
 %
-We had to develop strategies that would support different these
+We had to develop strategies that would support these different
 organizational cultures. As reported in Section \ref{sec:process}, the
 MP is organized in a functional hierarchical organizational structure,
-typically, a  traditional development paradigm. Therefore, we had to
+typically adopting a traditional development paradigm. Therefore, we had to
 create a translation process between our team and the MP managers who
-managed the project on their side assuming a traditional, waterfall
+managed the project on their side assuming a traditional waterfall
 process.
-\textbf{Manage higher-level and lower-level goals separately.}
-During the initial phase of the project the MP team would often bring
-strategic discussions to technical/operational meetings, where we were
-supposed to discuss practical, technical decisions.
+\textbf{Managing higher-level and lower-level goals separately.}
+During the initial phase of the project, the MP team has brought
+strategic discussions to technical/operational meetings that
+were supposed to be about practical technical decisions.
 %
 This produced a highly complex communication and management environment,
-overloading the professors because they were supposed to be responsible
-for maintaining the strategic alignment of the MP synchronized with
-implementation plans of the development team, specially in light of the
-aforementioned culture mismatch. Mixing both concerns in the same
+overloading the professors because they were supposed 
+for maintaining the MP strategy synchronized with the
+implementation plans of the development team. This was hard, especially because the
+aforementioned cultural mismatch. Mixing both concerns in the same
 discussions caused confusion on both sides.
 %
-Towards the middle and end of the project we were able to keep those
+From the middle of the project we were able to keep those
 concerns separated, what eased the work of everyone involved.
 \textbf{Living with ill-advised political decisions.}
 At the initial phases of the project, by political and personal
 motivation, the main stakeholders from the Brazilian government imposed
-the use of Colab to guide the development of the new SPB platform.  Our
+the use of Colab to guide the development of the new SPB platform. Our
 team was totally against the idea because we already knew that Colab was
 a very experimental project and its adoption could dramatically increase
-the project complexity.  Even though we provided technical reasons to
-not utilize Colab, MP was adamant and we had to manage this problem. As
-explained in section \ref{sec:architecture} we did massive changes to
-it, and at the end of the project we completely rewrote Colab and made
+the project complexity. Even though we provided technical reasons to
+not utilize Colab, the MP was adamant and we had to manage this problem. As
+explained in section \ref{sec:architecture}, we did massive changes to
+Colab, and at the end of the project we have completely rewritten it to make
 it stable. It is important to notice that the MP compelled us to accept
-a technical issue based only on political interests, without considering
+a technical decision based only on political interests, without considering
 all the resources that would be spent due to that decision. At the end
 of the project, we verified that Colab indeed consumed a vast amount of
-the budget and increased the project complexity. In the end of the
+the budget and increased the project complexity. At the end of the
 project and after our analysis on the decision made by the MP, we
-understand that MP's managers are capable of ignoring technical reasons
-in favor to a political decision.
+understand that MP managers are capable of ignoring technical reasons
+in favor of political decisions.
 \textbf{Consider sustainability from the beginning.}
-In the process of deploying the SPB platform in the MP structure, we had
+In the process of deploying the SPB platform in the MP infrastructure we had
 to interact with the MP technicians. We did several workshops, training
 and a meticulous documentation describing all the required procedures to
 update the platform, however, we realized that the MP technicians
 constantly avoid the responsibility. After noticing the aforementioned
-situation, we organized a specific DevOps that completely automated all
+situation, we organized a DevOps team that completely automated all
 the deployment procedure. We simplified all the platform deployment to a
 few steps: (1) initial configurations (just ssh configuration) and (2)
 the execution of simple commands to completely update the platform. By
@@ -114,8 +114,8 @@ the end of the project, we observed that the MP technicians invariably
 still depended on our support to update the platform even with all the
 automation provided by us. We were sadly left with a feeling of
 uncertainty about the future of the platform after the project ended. In
-hindsight, we realize that the MP dedicated systems analysts and
+hindsight, we realize that the MP dedicated system analysts and
 managers to the project, but not operations technicians. The later
-should have been more involved with the process so they could at least
-comfortable with managing the platform infrastructure.
+should have been more involved with the process so they could at least be
+comfortable in managing the platform infrastructure.
@@ -4,35 +4,57 @@
 In this paper we presented and discussed issues experienced during a government-funded 
 project, in partnership with the University of Brasilia and the University of
 São Paulo, to evolve the Brazilian Public Software Portal. 
-
-The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we presented how an unprecedented
-platform was developed and delivered to the Brazilian government. This 
-platform - developed by a heterogeneous team of professors, masters and 
-undergraduate  students, IT professionals, and governmental managers - provides 
-several modern features for the integration of more than 10 FLOSS systems.
-
-Second, the experience in the SPB Portal project pointed 
-out that it is possible to mitigate conflicts in the development environment
-and to conciliate governmental and academy cultures. The team was engaged in
-providing a friendly working environment as well as in showing to governmental agents
-another way to interact with the FLOSS community and the university. In the paper,
-we tried to show that, as long as the institution can provide a healthy and challenging
-environment to its students, one may conciliate studies and professional training
-in universities. After the end of the project, some students successfully
+Its contributions are twofold. First, we present the strategy used to develop
+and to deliver an unprecedented platform to Brazilian government. Second,
+based on the results of the SPB Portal project, we point out that it is
+possible to mitigate conflicts experienced in the development environment
+and to conciliate governmental and academy cultures. 
+
+The SPB portal integrates more than 10 FOSS tools and provides several features,
+such as social network, mailing list, version control, content management and
+source code quality monitoring. Concerned with the platform susteinability and
+maintainabilty, the aforementioned 10 FOSS tools were integrated with minimum
+differences from their official versions and the new developed features were
+sent upstream to ensure an alignment between the portal systems and their
+respective official versions. In the integration process, the main softwares
+were identified, specific teams were formed to work with each one of them
+and each team was composed of students with different levels of skills and at
+least one senior professional.
+
+In terms of mitigating conflicts, we tried to show that, as long as the
+institution can provide a healthy and challenging environment to its students,
+one may conciliate studies and professional training in universities.
+In our work process, based on open and collaborative software development
+practices, students could negotiate their work schedule as well as count on IT
+professionals to solve development issues.
+Among the students, we have defined coachs for each team and a meta-coach
+(coach of whole project). All coaches, together with professors, have
+intermediated the comunication between client (Ministry of Planning of Brasil)
+and the rest of the group. 
+After the end of the project, some students successfully
 embraced opportunities in public and private sectors, within national borders
 and abroad. Some other students went further and started their own companies.
+
 We also demonstrate that, with some adaptations/"translation processes", it is feasible
-to conciliate agile methodologies and FOSS practices in order to develop software to 
+to conciliate agile methodologies and FOSS practices to develop software to 
 governmental organizations with functional hierarchical structures that use 
 traditional development paradigm.
+Aiming at reducing client questions about workconclusion, a DevOps front was
+created to automate all deploy process and also  to work in continuous
+delivery. The government was brought to our work environment and interacted
+with our management and comunication tools. For the project success, we
+focused on providing a friendly working environment as well as on showing to
+governmental agents another way to interact with the FLOSS community and the
+university. 
 \leo{Padronziar uso FOSS vs FLOSS. Qual vcs preferem?}
 Future work should use data produced by the project to validate and evaluate
-how the used FLOSS and Agile practices have impacted the students and also the
+how the used FOSS and Agile practices have impacted the students and the
 governmental development process. For this, we would conduce a \textit{postmortem}
 analysis using the project open data and a survey targeting the involved actors.
+\textbf{Final remarks}
 The portal is available at \url{softwarepublico.gov.br}. All
 documentation, including detailed architecture and operation manuals are
@@ -44,7 +66,7 @@ in open repositories, available on the SPB Portal itself. We also
 contributed these features back to the respective communities, which
 benefits both those communities and us, since we can share future
 development and maintenance effort with other organizations that
-participate in these projects.
+participate in these projects. 
 %===========
 % Conclusion