Software Público Brasileiro

\section{Research Design}
\label{sec:researchdesign}

% TODO (by Siqueira): Tenho a impressão de que esse parágrafo cairia bem no último parágrafo
% da introdução. Pelo menos a ideia dele uma vez que resume bem o trabalho
In this paper, we studied practical alternatives to harmonize different
software development processes. We are interested in the relationship between
government and academia from the project management perspective, without the
enforcement of changing the internal processes. We present two research
questions that guided our work:

\textbf{RQ1.}\textit{How to introduce open source and agile best practices into
government-academia collaboration project?}

\textbf{RQ2.}\textit{What practices would favor effective team management in
government-academia collaborative project?}

To answer these questions, we use as a case study research method. We selected
as a case the evolution of the Brazilian Public Software portal (SPB)
\cite{meirelles2017spb}, a government-academia collaborative project based on
FLOSS projects. To validate our answers, we picked three different points of
views: developers, government agent, and data collected from the project
repository.

\subsection{The case study}

The project to evolve the SPB portal was a partnership between government and
academia held between 2014 and 2016 \cite{meirelles2017spb}. The old version of
SPB suffers from maintenance problems and design-reality gaps. In this sense,
Ministry of Planning (MPOG) decided to join the University of Brasília (UnB)
and the University of São Paulo (USP) to develop a new platform based existing
FLOSS projects. However, it was required to integrate multiple software in the
same system in the way that end-user has a unified experience between the
tools.

In short, the SPB portal evolved into a Collaborative Development Environment
(CDE) \cite{booch2003}. It was a novelty in the context of the Brazilian
government, due to the technologies employed and its diverse features. The
project includes social networking, mailing lists, version control system, and
source code quality monitoring. All of this software is integrated using a
system-of-systems framework \cite{meirelles2017spb}.

The academic team carried out development activities in the Advanced Laboratory
of Production, Research, and Innovation in Software Engineering (LAPPIS) at
UnB. The laboratory born from a professor that is part of Brazillian FLOSS
community and another one that spreads out agile values. Thus, naturally,
LAPPIS embrace the best practices of both ecosystems. For this project, the
laboratory had a total of 42 undergraduate interns, and two professors engaged
in the development team. Finally, the project hired six senior developers with
significant experience with FLOSS communities, and two designers specialized in
User Experience (UX).

The government team was composed of one director, one coordinator, and two IT
analysts from MPOG. They were responsible for contracts and managed the
collaboration, which means they do not produce software. Analysts following
traditional management approaches (e.g., RUP, CMMI, and PMBOK) for a new
contract and homologating software services.

The leaders of LAPPIS and MPOG periodically met in person to manage the project
progress, discussing strategic issues and technical goals. Initially, these
meetings took place at the Ministry's headquarters and, usually, only directors
and professors participated. On the academic side, the management of the
development teams often spends two weeks per sprint and release a new version
each 4-month. During the project progress, this workflow proved to be
inefficient. Conflicts between the internal management processes and
differences in pace and goals of each institution were compromising the
platform development.

Professors with senior developers' collaboration adopted, incrementally, a set
of best practices based on FLOSS ecosystems and agile values to improve the
project management process and reduce the conflict between the government and
academia. Throughout the project, the LAPPIS team built an experimental
management model to harmonize the different cultures. The development leaders
made decisions in a non-systematic way to promote the usage of these best
practices. In this paper, we analyze and codify these decisions and its
benefits.

\subsection{Survey, Interview and Data Collection}

We divided the development team into two groups of participants according to
their roles during the project: UnB undergraduate interns and senior
developers. For each set of members, we designed an online questionnaire with
topics related to (1) project organization, (2) development process, (3)
communication and relationship between members, (4) acquired knowledge and (5)
experience with FLOSS projects. We also interviewed two MPOG analysts who
directly interacted with the development team and project development process.
The interview questions had four parts: (1) Professional profile;(2)
Organization, communication and development methodologies (3) Satisfaction with
the developed platform; (4) Lessons learned.

We sent the link to the online questionnaire to 42 interns, all of them worked
at any period of the project as a developer and received a scholarship. We
received a total of 37 responses. At the time of the project, their average age
was 22 years old, and 92\% of them are male. Currently, 35\% continue at the
university as undergraduate or graduate students, 19\% work as a developer in a
small company and 19\% in medium or large enterprises, 11\% are entrepreneurs,
8\% are unemployed, 5\% are teachers, and 3\% are public servants. About of the
interns, 43\% said the SPB project was their first experience with FLOSS
projects.

We also invited the eight IT professionals to fill the online questionnaire,
and all of them did. Their average age was 30 years old in 2015, and 87\% are
male. On average they have 11 years of experience in the IT market. Currently,
62\% of the interviewed have a formal job, 37\% are freelance developers, 25\%
are master's degree students, and 25\% are entrepreneurs. On average they
worked in 5 different companies and participated in 4 to 80 projects. They
joined in this collaborative project between 7 to 24 months, and 86\% of them
had some experience with FLOSS before the SPB project.

We interviewed two MPOG analysts separately.  Each interview took an average of
2 hours with 28 open questions. They are over 30 years old, and they have more
than seven years of experience working in the government. Only one of them
continues working in the same ministry. Both of the analysts said this
collaborative project was their first experience of government-academia
development collaboration.
 
Finally, we analyzed, quantitatively, data about the project development,
publicly available on the SPB platform. We collected data from the central
project repository all the issues and commits. Regarding the issues, we
obtained the total of them, project name, authors, opening date, title, and the
number of comments.  We also get information about the total commits, different
authors per issues, the number of comments, authors of comments, the number of
comment authors.  During the period from April 2015 to June 2016, 59 distinct
authors opened 879 issues from a total of 4,658 comments and 64 different
commentators. The development team made 3,256 commits in the central project
repository.