Software Público Brasileiro

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

The focus on this paper is investigating practical ways to reconcile cultural
differences in software development process between government and academia,
without modifying their internal processes. Our analysis was guided by the
following research questions:

\textbf{RQ1.}\textit{What practices based on open source development experiences would
help to combine teams with different management processes in a
government-academia collaboration project?}


\textbf{RQ2.}\textit{How do open source development practices benefit the process of
developing an e-government platform in a government-academia collaboration?}

To answer these questions, we use as a case study the evolution project of the
SPB portal \cite{meirelles2017spb}, a government-academia collaborative
development based on open source software integration. We designed two surveys
and an interview to the different roles performed by the project
participants and collect public data from the project development environment
available on the developed platform itself. Our research approach is detailed
in the following subsections.

\subsection{The case study}

The project to evolve the Brazilian Public Software Portal was a partnership
between government and academia held between 2014 and 2016
\cite{meirelles2017spb}. To solve maintenance problems and fill design-reality
gaps in the portal, the Ministry of Planning (MPOG) joined the University of
Brasília (UnB) and the University of São Paulo (USP) to develop a platform
based on the integration and evolution of five existing open source
software. This environment was a novelty in the context of the Brazilian
government, due to the technologies employed and its diverse features,
including social networking (Noosfero), mailing lists (MailMan), version
control system (GitLab), and source code quality monitoring (Mezuro), all
integrated using a system-of-systems software (Colab) \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 project management and development process in this laboratory is usually
executed adopting empirical practices from open source communities and agile
methodologies. For this project, a total of 42 undergraduate students and two
professors participated in the development team. Six IT professionals were also
hired as senior developers due their experiences in open source projects and
two designers specialized in User eXperience. 

The government team was composed of one director, one coordinator, and two IT
analysts from a department of MPOG. Although they were responsible for the
execution of this collaboration, their department generally does not execute
development of ministry's software projects, since its responsibility is
contracting and homologating software development services, following
traditional management approaches, such as the RUP, CMMI, and PMBOK.

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The leaders of these two aforementioned teams periodically met in person for
the purpose of managing the project progress, discussing strategic and
technical goals. Initially, these meetings took place at the ministry's
headquarters and, usually, only directors and professors participated. The
management of the development team was concentrated in the academic side and
was organized in biweekly sprints and 4-month releases. With the progress of
the project, 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 we have adopted and evolute a set of empirical practices
based on open source ecossystems and agile methodologies, establishing an empirical
management model.

\subsection{Survey and data collection}

We divided the UnB development team into two groups of target participants
according to their roles during the project: \textit{UnB Interns} and
\textit{Senior Developers}. For each group, we designed an online survey with
topics related to project organization, development process, communication and
relationship between members, acquired knowledge and experience with open
source projects. We interviewed also two \textit{MPOG analysts} who directly
interacted with the development team and project development process. The
interview questions could be classified into four parts: Professional profile;
Organization, communication and development methodologies in the context of
government and project; Satisfaction with the developed platform; Lessons
learned.

We sent the link of the online survey through emails to 42 UnB interns
(undergraduate students), who participated in any time of the project as
developer receiving scholarship. We received a total of 37 responses. Their
average age is 25 years old and 91.9\% of them are male. Currently, 35.1\%
continue at university as undergraduate or graduate students, 18.9\% work as
developer in a small company and 18.9\% in medium or large companies, 10.8\%
are entrepreneurs, 8.1\% are unemployed and the others work as teachers or
civil servants. 43.2\% said the SPB project was their first experience with
open source software.

We also sent the link of the online survey through emails to eight senior
developers (IT professionals). All of them answered the questionnaire.
Their average age is 32 years old and 87.5\% are male. They have an average of
11 years of experience in the IT market, and currently 62.5\% of respondents
are company employees, 37.5\% are freelance developers, 25\% are master's
degree students and 25\% entrepreneurs. They have worked on average in 5
companies and participated in 4 to 80 projects. They participated in this
collaborative project between 7 to 24 months. 85.7\% of them had some
experience with free software before the SPB project.

Two MPOG IT analysts were interviewed separately.  Each interview took an
average of 2 hours with 28 open questions. They are more than 30 years old and
have been government employees for more than 7 years.  Only one of them
continues working in the same ministry. For both, this collaborative project
was their first experience of government-academia development collaboration.

Finally, we quantitatively analyze data about the development of the project,
publicly available on the SPB platform. We collected from the repository
manager tool of the platform all open issues and commits related to the main
repository of the platform, that is, the development repositories of the
integrated software were not considered.  For issues, we collected project
name, author of the issue, opening date, issue title, and number of comments.
We also collected informations about total open issues, total commits,
different authors of issues, total of different authors of issues, total of
comments, authors of comments, total of authors other than comments.  During
the period from April 2015 to June 2016, 879 issues was opened by 59 distinct
authors with a total of 4,658 comments and 64 distinct commentators. The
development team made 3,256 commits in the repository provided by SPB platform.