Software Público Brasileiro

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

We studied practical alternatives to harmonize the software project lifecycle
when confronting different development processes from crucial stakeholders. We
are interested in the relationship between government and academia from the
project management perspective, without the enforcement of changing their
internal processes. We present two research questions that guided this work:

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

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

To answer these questions, we used the case study as research method. We
selected as a case the evolution of the Brazilian Public Software (SPB) portal
\cite{meirelles2017spb}, a government-academia collaborative project based on
FLOSS systems. To validate our answers, we covered three different points of
view: 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 suffered from maintenance problems and design-reality gaps. The new
platform had the primary requirement to be based on existing FLOSS projects and
integrate multiple systems into one, providing the end user with a unified
experience. The reasons behind these requirements are the attempt to reduce
costs by taking the upstream updates and internal political issues. In this
sense, The Ministry of Planning (MPOG) decided to join the University of
Brasília (UnB) and the University of São Paulo (USP) to develop a new platform.

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
portal includes social networking, mailing lists, version control system, and
source code quality monitoring. All software is integrated using a
system-of-systems framework \cite{meirelles2017spb}.  These characteristics led
the project to interact with different FLOSS projects.

The platform development took place at the Advanced Laboratory of Production,
Research, and Innovation in Software Engineering (LAPPIS/UnB) and the FLOSS
Competence Center at USP (CCSL/USP). It is important to highlight that LAPPIS
was selected to lead SPB project for geographical reasons (the laboratory is
close to the MPOG) and due to its know-how on FLOSS communities. Undergraduate
interns, IT professionals and professors formed a partially distributed
development team. While interns and professors worked in-person, most IT
professionals worked remotely. Their activities followed the workflow of
biweekly sprints and 4-month releases.

On the managerial aspect, at the project
beginning, the collaboration management and strategic discussions happened only
once a month, when project leaders and MPOG directors met in person at the
ministry's headquarters.  Table~\ref{tab:gov-academia-diff} summarizes the
organizational differences in both involved sides.

\vspace*{-.5cm}

\begin{table}[h]
\centering
\def\arraystretch{1.2}
\setlength\tabcolsep{0.2cm}
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabular}{m{4.3cm}!{\color{white}\vrule}m{7cm}!{\color{white}\vrule}m{8cm}}
\rowcolor[HTML]{c0d6e4} 
\textbf{Collaboration peaces} & \textbf{Academia} & \textbf{Goverment} \\
\rowcolor[HTML]{f2f2f2}
\textbf{Responsibilities} & Platform development activites & Contracts and collaboration management \\
\rowcolor[HTML]{fafafa}
\textbf{Team size} &
\begin{tabular}[c]{@{}l@{}} 42 undergraduate interns \\ 2 professors \\ 6 senior developers with significant \\ experience in FLOSS projects\\ 2 Designers (UX specialists) \end{tabular} & 
\begin{tabular}[c]{@{}l@{}} 1 director \\ 1 coordinator \\ 2 requirement analysts \end{tabular} \\
\rowcolor[HTML]{f2f2f2}
\textbf{Workplace} & LAPPIS at UnB and CCSL at USP & MPOG headquarters \\
\rowcolor[HTML]{fafafa}
\begin{tabular}[c]{@{}l@{}}\textbf{Management} \textbf{approaches}\end{tabular} & FLOSS practices and Agile values & Mindset from RUP, CMMI, and PMBOK \\
\end{tabular}%
}
\caption{Differences between academia and government sides.}
\label{tab:gov-academia-diff}
\end{table}

\vspace*{-1cm}

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. To improve the
project management process and reducing the mismatching between government and
academia, professors, with the senior developers' collaboration, incrementally
employed a set of best practices based on FLOSS and agile values.

The government investment in FLOSS projects, the geographical advantages, the
novelty of the SPB project in Brazillian government, and the system-of-system
characteristic made SPB as a perfect case study. Throughout the project, the
development leaders made decisions in a non-systematic way to promote the usage
of FLOSS and agile techniques. In this paper, we analyzed and codified these
decisions and how they favored the collaboration progress.

\subsection{Survey, Interview and Data Collection}

We separated the project team into three groups: undergraduate interns, IT
professionals (senior developers and designers), and MPOG analysts. For the
first two we sent online questionnaires, and for the last one, we conducted
2-hour interviews. Table \ref{survey-table} presents the details of these
processes.

\vspace*{-.5cm}

\begin{table}[h]
\centering
\def\arraystretch{1.2}
\setlength\tabcolsep{0.2cm}
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabular}{m{4cm}!{\color{white}\vrule}m{5cm}!{\color{white}\vrule}m{6cm}!{\color{white}\vrule}m{6cm}}
\rowcolor[HTML]{c6b3df} 
\textbf{} & \textbf{\nohyphens{Undergraduate Interns}} & \textbf{Senior Developers} & \textbf{MPOG Analysts} \\
\rowcolor[HTML]{fafafa}
\textbf{Research technique} & Online questionnaire & Online questionnaire & Interview \\
\rowcolor[HTML]{f2f2f2}
\textbf{Discussed topics} & \multicolumn{2}{l!{\color{white}\vrule}}{\begin{tabular}[c]{@{}l@{}}(1) project organization\\ (2) the development process\\ (3) communication and relationship with members\\ (4) knowledge sharing\\ (5) experience with FLOSS projects\end{tabular}} & \begin{tabular}[c]{@{}l@{}}(1) professional profile\\ (2) organization, communication \\ and development methodologies\\ (3) satisfaction with \\ the developed platform\\ (4) lessons learned\end{tabular} \\
\rowcolor[HTML]{fafafa}
\textbf{Number of interviewed} & 42 & 8 & 2 \\
\rowcolor[HTML]{f2f2f2}
\textbf{Rate of responses} & 88\% (37) & 100\% & 100\% \\
\rowcolor[HTML]{fafafa}
\textbf{Average age at the end of the project} & 22 years old & 30 years old & 30 years old \\
\rowcolor[HTML]{f2f2f2}
\textbf{Gender} & \begin{tabular}[c]{@{}l@{}}8\% women \\ 92\% man\end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}[c]{@{}l@{}}13\% women \\ 87\% man\end{tabular} & 100\% women \\
\rowcolor[HTML]{fafafa}
\begin{tabular}[c]{@{}l@{}}\textbf{Experience} \\ \textbf{background}\end{tabular} & 43\% of the interns had the SPB project as their first contact with FLOSS & 11 years of experience; worked in at least 5 companies; participated in 4 to 80 distinct projects; 86\%of them had some background with FLOSS before the SPB project & more than 7 years working in the government; SPB project represented their first experience of government-academia collaboration \\
\end{tabular}%
}
\caption{Surveying the project participants}
\label{survey-table}
\end{table}

\vspace*{-1cm}

Finally, we analyzed the data from the central project repository considering
all the issues and commits. From April 2015 to June 2016, 59 distinct authors
opened 879 issues, 64 different users made the total of 4,658 comments. The
development team made 3,256 commits in this abovementioned repository.