Software Público Brasileiro

\section{Discussion}
\label{sec:discussion}

Organizational culture is built and reinforced every life year of a large-size
organization. These cultural values reflect on the internal management
processes and the norms of communication among its members. In the context of
software development projects, each institution adopts development methods that
best meet its managerial procedures and organizational routines. When two
large-size organizations decide to develop a solution collaboratively, the
development methods and workflow of one may conflict with the interests of the
other. In a case of government-academia collaboration, conciliating their
different management processes is crucial, since the poor and unadaptable
management could lead the project to fail, resulting in the waste of
population-funded resources.

\begin{table}[hbt]
\centering
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabular}{ | m{4cm} m{10cm} m{10cm} | } 
\hline
\textbf{Decision} & \textbf{Practice Explanation} & \textbf{Benefits} \\ \hline
\textbf{Use of the system under development to develop the system itself} &
\begin{itemize}
\item The features and tools of the platform under development supported the project management and communication activities.
\end{itemize} &
\begin{itemize}
\item Communicating with transparency and efficiency; 
\item Monitoring of activities;
\item More interactions between developers and public servants;
\item Trust the developed code;
\item Organic documentation;
\end{itemize} \\ \hline

\textbf{Bring together government staff and development team} &
\begin{itemize} 
\item Government staff, academic coordinators, senior developers and team coaches biweekly meet at the university lab, academia headquarters, for sprint planning and review.
\item Conduct on the platform the technical discussions between government staff and the development team.
\item Involve government board directors only in strategic planning of the project.
\item Build a continuous delivery pipeline with steps involving both sides.
\end{itemize} &
\begin{itemize} 
\item Reducing communication misunderstanding;
\item Better meeting expectations of both sides;
\item Improvement of decision-making process;
\item Overcoming the government bias regarding low productivity of collaborative projects with academia;
\item Synchronizing the execution pace of activities;
\item Improve the translation of the process from one side to the other.
\end{itemize} \\ \hline

\textbf{Divide the development team into priority fronts, and for each one, hire at least one specialist from the IT market} &
\begin{itemize}
\item The coordinators separated the development team into priority work areas considering the main demands of the project.
\item IT market professionals with recognized experience on each front were hired to work in person or remotely.
\item Define among the interns the leadership roles: a coach for each front, and a meta-coach of the entire development team.
\item Each team has certain self-organization, being guided by one intern-coach and at least one senior developer.
\end{itemize} & 
\begin{itemize}
\item Conciliating the development processes of each institution, taking better technical decisions;
\item Improving the management and technical knowledge;
\item Self-organizing and gaining autonomy in the management of their tasks.
\end{itemize}\\ \hline
\end{tabular}%
}
\caption{Empirical SPB management decisions and its benefits.}
\label{practices-table}
\end{table}

\vspace{-.9cm}

We investigated the management method employed at the SPB portal project, a
partnership between the Brazilian government and universities. The development
leaders empirically built an approach using FLOSS and agile development
practices and values.  As a result, we identified a set of best practices which
improves the workflow and relationship between the organizations involved.  Our
results reveal a set of nine management practices successfully employed in
abovementioned case.  We analyzed unsystematic decisions made during a 30-month
collaborative project and identified three macro-decisions that harmonized the
differences of the management processes of each organization. We evidenced from
data collection, and responses of the members of both sides to the
questionnaires and interviews, the benefits obtained through the adoption of
this empirical method. The Table \ref{practices-table} summarizes
macro-decisions, practices, and benefits.

Regarding our first research question \textit{``How to introduce open source and
agile best practices into government-academia collaboration projects?''}, we
examined the SPB project and identified three macro-decisions taken by the
academic coordinators that led them to intuitively and non-systematically adopt
FLOSS and agile practices in the development process. We extracted nine best
management practices and verified their efficient use collecting data from the
management tool and interviewing the project participants.

The interviewed responses allowed us to understand how FLOSS and agile
practices have benefited the people and project management. Based on that, we
answered our second research question \textit{``What practices favor
effective team management in government-academia collaborative projects?''},
making to explicit in Table \ref{practices-table} eleven benefits obtained from
the use of the nine best practices.

The results of this current work corroborate the lessons learned in our
previous work on studying the SPB project case \cite{meirelles2017spb}.
Evidence from the data collected, responses to questionnaires, and interviews
reinforce what has been reported by the academic coordination of the project,
adding the point of views of government and other roles involved on the
academic side. In short, the government staff had difficulty to understand how
collaboration works. They took time to realize that the project was not a
client-executor relationship and that both organizations were at the same
hierarchical level in the work plan. Finally, they also felt the project needed
a decision-maker role to resolve impasses between organizations, and the
development coordinators sometimes took on that.

The decisions, practices, and benefits presented in the Table
\ref{practices-table} should be evaluated and used in contexts with more
substantial plurality and diversity of government stakeholders. As threats to
the validity of this work, we point out the lack of communication records and
low traceability of the management data referring to the first phase of the
project. We also consider as a threat the hiatus between the completion of the
project and the conduction of interviews and questionnaires, since we rely on
the memory of the interviewees to rescue the events. Furthermore, the new work
experiences of the respondents after the project and their current working
mindset may also modify their interpretation of the topics addressed in the
questionnaire and consequently their responses.

Finally, we collected a significant amount of data and testimonials related to
the teaching of software engineering. We consider that the project studied is
also an educational case. It is an example of how to teach information
technology students FLOSS and agile approaches applied to production-level
software development. As future work, we intend to analyze this collected
information to propose improvements in the teaching of software engineering for
undergraduates.