\section{The Case Study}
\label{sec:casestudy}

%In this section, we present the SPB platform (its goals and its users) and describe the three-years-long project for the evolution of the platform (its development and management process and its organizational structure: team, coordination, roles and interactions). We will also describe the governmental organizational structure and how they managed the project (staff, roles, documentation / reports required) and, finally, we will present possible points of conflict and their possible impacts on the project.


The Brazilian Public Software portal is an e-government project for sharing Brazilian Public Software, a specific type of software that meets the needs of modernization of public administration. The availability of this software in electronic via aims at saving public resources, benefiting the State and society. The first version of the portal was released in 2007 and it was based on the OpenACS software. OpenACS was no longer maintained by the community and the lack of new development and sustainability projects made the platform obsolete with uncontrollable crashes. With approximately 145 requirements mapped out in dialogues with public agencies and society, a new platform needed to be created.

The evolution of the Brazilian Public Software platform was a partnership project between the Brazilian government and Brazilian public universities between the years 2014 and 2016. The management and development team was made up of employees from the Ministry of Planning (MPOG), professors from the University of Brasília (UnB), professionals of the IT market, MSc students in Computer Science at the University of São Paulo (USP), and undergraduate students in Software Engineering at the University of Brasília. The project was developed physically in the Advanced Laboratory of Production, Research & Innovation in Software of UnB. In Brasília, capital of Brazil, the federal government is the most important customer and the largest bidder of software development contracts. Understanding the particularities of projects with the government and being prepared to meet your goals and pace of production is important for students professionally. Thus, this collaborative project was an opportunity for the transfer of knowledge between academia and government and for the practical application of the project management methods taught in the undergraduate course in Software Engineering.

Differences in the organizational and managerial structure of the institutions to which each member belonged generated differences in goals, requirements and pace of execution. On the MPOG side, the requirements analysts were ministry staff who interacted most actively with the development team, their productivity was reported to their coordinator, and their coordinator reported to the board of directors. The director of the department responsible for software development had no autonomy over the deployment infrastructure. As the development and deployment of the ministry followed a traditional approach, opening a window of dialogue between these two departments for software deployment in production was usually not costly. Thus, the development of a software solution basically passed through the following steps: mapping requirements, prepararing a contract of licitation, hiring of contract executor, homologation of the product, delivery and deployment of the software, and payment.

On the UnB side, the agile approach was used for development. Due to the amount and maturity of the requirements demanded and the novelty, in the governmental context, of several features, the traditional methodologies was unsuitable for the development of complex integrated software platform. The coordinator led the dialogue with board of directors as well as managed the interactions between MPOG staff and developer team. The development team was divided into specific groups for the main contexts and there was self-coordination among team members. The activities were organized by sprints of 15 days and the epics in 4 months. The development was incremental, with intermediate deliveries. Due to differences in deployment pace between MPOG and UnB and other bureaucratic issues, the first version of the portal was launched on the university infrastructure and later migrated to the ministry infrastructure.

The main conflicts in the development process of the platform arose from the very nature of traditional and agile approaches: the government expected fully specified functionalities before implementation, a large volume of documentation, formalization of reports with full functionality deliveries, function point calculations for changes in requirements; the academy understood that features should be broken down into small functionalities with short-term deliverables for validation, decisions about what would be developed and how it would be developed should be collaboratively taken between client and developers, roles were flexible and organized organically.


