Improving Software Projects Inception Phase Using Games
ActiveAction Workshop
Miguel Ehécatl Morales-Trujillo
1
, Hanna Oktaba
1
and Juan Carlos González
2
1
Graduate Science and Engineering Computing, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico
2
ENTIA, Av. López Mateos 2077 Int. Z-16, Col. Jardines de Plaza del Sol, Guadalajara, Mexico
Keywords: Games, Inception Phase, Requirements Specification, Stakeholders’ Involvement, Software Project,
Workshop.
Abstract: Studies have demonstrated that an important factor to increase the success rate of software projects is the
involvement of key stakeholders at the right time, in order to define business objectives, scope of the project
and requirements. The Inception phase of projects is in charge to provide these outcomes and is suitable to
really involve stakeholders as team members because of the non-technical nature of the activities. However,
since the stakeholders' involvement is a time- and money-consuming activity, it is important to maximize its
efficiency. With that in mind, ludic aspect inherent to games can be used as a strategy to optimize the
Inception phase. This paper presents ActiveAction, a game-based workshop used as an alternative for the
software project’s Inception phase in order to increase its effectiveness and improve the stakeholders’
involvement in the project. ActiveAction combines classical and game-based techniques which permit a
deep involvement of stakeholders and a collaborative identification of objectives, constraints and risks
during an intensive workshop oriented to project conceptualization. ActiveAction workshop resulted in a
successful game-based strategy that has improved the Inception phase of 19 projects with different
customers. After-workshop surveys, projects outcomes and customer satisfaction indicate validity of the
method. ActiveAction is a valuable game-based alternative to carry out the Inception phase in a software
project. It makes possible to get an important amount of information, directly from key stakeholders in a
short period of time increasing the success rate of projects.
1 INTRODUCTION
A game could be defined informally as an
amusement activity with rules, undertaken for
entertainment but still pursuing a goal. A game can
be seen as an activity in which a player must learn
new skills and apply them to overcome challenges,
getting rewards or punishments, depending on their
success or failure, respectively. The application of
games in education, government or military areas
has become an important and feasible alternative to
face challenges. Since the entertainment is not the
main purpose of these games, they are labeled as
serious games.
A serious game is a game that does not have
entertainment, enjoyment or fun as their primary
purpose (Michael and Chen, 2005). Even thought,
according to (Abt, 1970) games may be played
seriously or casually, but it does not mean that
serious games are not, or should not be, entertaining.
The ludic and playful aspects inherent to games,
serious or not, can be used as a strategy to address
different kind of challenges and sorting obstacles.
Enclosing to Software Engineering, it can be
asserted that developing software and systems is a
challenging activity. In 2010, Standish Group,
through CHAOS Report (Chaos Summary, 2010),
revealed that only 32% of software projects were
successfull, 44% challenged and 24% were
cancelled. Comparing these data with that of other
industries, Construction for example, 94 percent of
the customers were satisfied with the results of their
projects, which suggests that construction projects
have much lower failure rates than software projects
(Stepanek, 2005).
But, why is developing software different to
producing any other product? Why is it so difficult
to develop good products in a consistent way from
their inception phase and on?
The purpose of the Inception phase of a software
projects is establish the business case for the system
180
Morales-Trujillo M., Oktaba H. and González J..
Improving Software Projects Inception Phase Using Games - ActiveAction Workshop.
DOI: 10.5220/0004891801800187
In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE-2014), pages 180-187
ISBN: 978-989-758-030-7
Copyright
c
2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
and delimit the project scope (Kruchten, 2003). The
stakeholders' involvement in this phase is inherent
and fundamental.
However, including stakeholders as part of the
team, but in the real sense, requires time and money.
With that in mind this paper presents ActiveAction,
a workshop used as an alternative into the software
project’s Inception phase. ActiveAction combines
classical with game-based techniques to improve
stakeholders’ involvement in the Inception phase of
a project and increase its effectiveness.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2
presents main success factors in IT projects, while
Section 3 expands on the strategies to conceptualize
projects using traditional, agile and game-based
techniques. Section 4 then goes on to introduce and
analyze the ActiveAction workshop, while Section 5
presents results of the usage of this method, its
advantages and disadvantages. Conclusions and
future work are provided in Section 6.
2 SUCCESS FACTORS IN
SOFTWARE PROJECTS
Are software projects different to other projects?
According to (Stepanek, 2005) the main difference
relies on the characteristics of software and
technology. On one hand, software is abstract and
complex while the requirements to be developed are
incomplete. On the other hand, the vast domain of
technology changes rapidly, causing lack of
technical experience and immaturity of best
practices.
According to Gartner (Gartner survey, 2012) the
most common “anti-success” project factors are:
poor quality, cancelling after launch, high cost
variance, substantially late delivery and functionality
issues. Determining if a project is successfull or not
could be hard, the success can be determined by a
combination of factors like scope, time or cost, but
another one could be ROI, quality or the healthiness
of the workplace (Ambler, 2007).
However, failure aspects related to technical
issues are not a critical factor (Ibrahim et al., 2013).
It means that improving technical aspects of projects
will not always lead to higher ratios of success.
Building robust business-oriented requirements
can be half of the solution; according to (Bloch et
al., 2012) one group of success factor is to manage
strategy and stakeholders. Taking it into account, a
first approach is to focus on the very beginning of
the project, and increase the stakeholders'
involvement in order to improve business modeling
and specification of requirements.
Nevertheless, the stakeholders' involvement
implies investing time, money, experience and
patience from both parties: software developer
organization and stakeholders.
We believe that inclusion of games is a
beneficial strategy to conceptualize a project
together with the stakeholders and increase the
success rate of projects.
3 SOFTWARE PROJECTS
INCEPTION PHASE
Conceptualization begins at the early steps of
projects, in the words of RUP (Kruchten, 2003), it
occurs during the Inception phase. At the Inception
phase the bussiness process is documented in order
to assure a common understanding among all
stakeholders, the system is described determining
the required functionalities, objectives, risks and
constraints, to deliver, successfully, a product which
meets the stakeholders’ needs.
The reality of an ordinary Inception phase is to
deal with plenty of meetings with different
stakeholders, final users and management staff
getting a broad idea of their sometimes contradictory
needs. Business analysts start to mediate inconsistent
requests and the work that was intended to take a
couple of weeks becomes longer.
A feasible solution, applied during Inception
phase, could be to elicit, envision, design and
prioritize the business needs until a minimal viable
product is clearly seen by key stakeholders involved
in the project, collaborating with the development
team.
In light of this, three approaches to manage
activities during the Inception phase are presented in
the next subsections.
3.1 Agile Approach
Small releases and stakeholders', users' and
customers' involvement in day-to-day activities are
part of the philosophy of agile practices to face the
requirements elicitation and prioritizing.
According to agile practices, conceptualization
and development of a project occurs almost at the
same time. It is achieved thanks to the Product
Owner (PO), a role in charge of having a vision of
what to build: they create and prioritize a list of
desired features, the Product Backlog. PO must have
a solid understanding of users, market place,
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competition and future trends for the domain or type
of system being developed. Also the PO requires
working closely with key stakeholders (Mountain
Goat, 2013).
An important complication of agile approach is
that the PO could be more than one person, and most
important, not all of them are ready or available to
be involved in a day-to-day dynamic.
3.2 Traditional Approach
The traditional approach is a process-centered way
of working. First, adequate stakeholders are
identified. Later, fixed interviews with clients and
stakeholders are held in order to identify their needs.
The input of this process is obtained from meetings,
focus groups, questionnaires or user observations.
The information is transformed by the development
team until a business model or requirements
specification is created and agreed upon with
stakeholders. This approach is expensive and
demands an arduous effort from both parties.
3.3 Game-based Approach
In fields of industry, such as marketing and sales,
games are used to help to understand customers,
market, business opportunities and to improve
everyday employee-related issues within an
organization (Gamestorming, 2013). The application
of these games has a broad spectrum: some
examples taken from (Innovation Games, 2013)
define their variety. For instance, Empathy Map's
objective is to gain insight and understanding for a
targeted public image; How-Now-Wow Matrix
pursuits the goal of selecting the best ideas as a
group; Job or Joy aims at improving working
environment of the organization; lastly, there are
classical techniques, such as SWOT analysis and
Pros/Cons adapted as games.
On the other hand, the application of such games
tends to be isolated strategies in order to accomplish
specific goals that may not be related to Software
Engineering. Besides, they are not organized as a
interrelated set of activities that reuses the result of a
previous activity as an input for the next, thus
making difficult to compose a method to attack more
complex problems.
Few reports of games that support approaches to
perform Software Engineering activities with
objectives not related to education nor training can
be found. One of those games is Software Quantum
Metaphor, a game that makes an allusion to the
chemical units known as quantum. The requirements
of the software project are visualized as a bag of
balls. Each ball visualizes one requirement or
quantum. There are balls of different colors, each
color representing a different state of analysis of the
requirements (Knauss et al., 2008).
Another game is the Labor Game Method,
described in (Torvinen, 1999). In this game the
requirements are presented through cards on a board.
Each card can be changed, or some cards can be
added or removed from the board. This game
permits to visualize all the requirements of the
project, their structure and priorities.
Taking into account the uncommonness of games
in Software Engineering development process and
the lack of a method that puts together games in
order to accomplish complex goals, the next section
presents a method that combines a set of classical
techniques with games, and is intended to improve
the Inception phase of software projects.
4 ActiveAction WORKSHOP
Entia (Entia, 2013) is a Mexican IT organization
established in 2003 as a software developer
organization conformed at the beginning by 4
employees, now 20. Entia has executed projects to
construct custom software related to finance, retail,
manufacturing and service sectors. They can be
classified into "process systematization" and
"business venture". The former consists in
developing a software system that automates a
specific process in the stakeholder's organization.
The latter is aiming at adding a new service or
product that will be offered to the stakeholder's
clients.
In order to increase the projects' success rate and,
consequently, the number of projects, Entia
developed Innocamp strategy. Innocamp consisted
in an intense workshop where all stakeholders
collaboratively design their new custom software
development project. This envisioning strategy was
created in order to avoid continual coming and going
between customers and Entia work team, caused by
the lack of definition, clarity and consensus in their
needs.
The Innocamp workshop let the organization
achieve such benefits as: bringing all of the
stakeholders to the organization at the same time and
place; stakeholders and work team invested quality
time during the workshop; complexity and size of a
project was better understood by the stakeholders;
and, both parties developed a synergy and emotional
attachment to the project.
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Since 2007 Innocamp has evolved into
ActiveAction workshop. The evolution started with
the inclusion of games as a way of entertaining the
stakeholders during the workshop. Over the time the
work team noticed that games helped to decrease
resistance and increase concentration level of the
stakeholders, causing an important impact on the
results of each workshop.
ActiveAction is a game-based workshop focused
on the software project conceptualization. It consists
of the following activities:
Pre-Day: It enables Entia to figure out
stakeholders' real motivations that made the new
project feasible. It includes negotiations between
the customer and the organization, calendar
planning for the rest -Days and collecting
relevant customer information. The organization
chooses adequate participants to take part in the
following -Days.
Intensive-Day: It is the actual method that
gathers stakeholders and consultants during 8-12
hours in the same place. 5 roles are required for
the consultant team: Coach, Analyst, Process
Engineer, Logistics and Customer Service and
Support. The purpose of the Intensive-Day is to
extract expectations, objectives, needs, risks, and
functional and non-functional requirements from
stakeholders using a collaborative and game-
based strategy.
Post-Day: The information gathered during Pre-
and Intensive-Day is structured in order to create
an IT strategy to deal with the project.
Action-Day: on this -Day a meeting takes place
in which the context, technological strategy and
supplier proposals are discussed with the
stakeholders in order to define the path that a
project will take.
For the purposes of this paper, the Intensive-Day is
presented in detail in the next subsection.
4.1 Intensive-Day Method
To carry out the Intensive-Day practices the
following requirements and material are supplied: a
room with 4.5 square meters per participant;
speakers, a whiteboard, a glass wall or canvas, a
projector, a TV, a special table for personal
belongings and toys, such as little balls and office
supplies like post-its, tacks, pencils and markers.
Additionally each consultant needs a computer,
Internet connection, source of electrical power and
connection to the projector. All participants are
seated in circle.
Intensive-Day method is composed by 19
practices that can be classified in two groups:
Core practices produce meaningful outcomes for
the Inception phase of the project and have a
defined order.
Auxiliary practices are focused on keeping
order, reducing stress and maintaining high
entertainment level. They have no special order
to follow.
Figure 1 presents the Intensive-Day method where
the game-based practices are marked with a "balero"
icon, which is a traditional Mexican toy. The core
practices are colored in light green, while the
auxiliary are dark green. Flows between practices
indicate the order of their execution.
The Intensive-Day method was expressed as a
composition of practices using KUALI-BEH
approach (Morales & Oktaba, 2012). This approach
establishes that a practice provides a systematic and
repeatable way of work focused on the achievement
of an objective. Each practice pursues the objective
of producing a result that originates from an input.
Using these three elements, objective, input and
result, the Intensive-Day game-based practices are
described below.
4.2 Game-based Practices
This section presents 10 game-involving practices.
4.2.1 Cover Story and Product Box (Core)
The objective of the practice called Cover Story and
Product Box (Hohmann, 2006) is to identify and
express the stakeholders' objectives. An interesting
fact is that the identified objectives should be
expressed as if they had already been achieved.
The practice of Cover Story is suitable when the
stakeholders' objectives belong to the area of
improving their companies' image, functioning or
prestige. The practice of Product Box is more
appropriate if the stakeholders' objective is to own
and sell a particular product.
In the former the stakeholders have to design a
cover story for a magazine that would be published
in the future and would narrate their success story;
while in the latter they design a box that would
contain the final product.
The input of these practices is objectives
provided by the stakeholders, while the results are
the cover story or the product box with
comprehensive objectives.
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4.2.2 Persons (Core)
The objective of Persons is to identify priorities of
cost, time and scope and their control strategy.
Three persons from the stakeholders’ team
portray each one of those variables, highlighting the
pros and cons in order to clarify the importance of
reducing or increasing their values. The stakeholders
listen and watch the game and have to make a
decision at the end, putting the three variables in a
priority order.
The input of the practice is an example of a
variable control matrix while the result is a matrix
with the agreed values of cost, time and scope.
4.2.3 Role Play (Core)
The Role Play objective is to simulate the
organization's everyday process. The simulation
consists in role-playing performed by stakeholders.
The role-play scenario is based on a frequent, but
complex episode from everyday business-oriented
activities in the stakeholders' organization. It also
should have exceptions or miscommunication issues
and needs to be rebuilt from a happy path.
The input of this practice is the actual process of
the organization used as a role play script. The
results are: a matrix of involved roles and a
successful criteria list of an everyday process. It also
provides contextual information of the stakeholders'
organization.
4.2.4 Metaphor (Core)
The Metaphor practice is based on the well-known
game Lego Serious Play, developed by LEGO
(LEGO, 2010). It is a structured process, where
participants use LEGO bricks to create models that
express their thoughts, reflections and ideas (Cantoni
et al., 2011). Here the prime objective is to obtain
product expectations from every member of the
stakeholders' organization.
The input is the matrix of involved roles and a
metaphor to motivate generation of ideas that will be
expressed as a LEGO figure. Each person of the
stakeholders team builds a figure, explains its
meaning and all of them are put together to interpret
their relationships and interactions working as one
team.
The results are: an interpretation of each LEGO
figure and a better understanding of relationships
among the roles in the matrix and within the process
through the set of LEGO figures.
4.2.5 Speedboat (Core)
The game practice of Speedboat is adapted from the
game designed by Luke Hohmann (Hohmann, 2006)
and its objective is to identify the project's potential
risks by and for the whole stakeholders’ team.
A speed boat is drawn on the top part of a
whiteboard while the participants write any risks that
can affect the project on post-its. Then they place
them on the white board as if they were anchors. The
lower a post-it is placed, the heavier the anchor is,
which means a high risk that will impact the project
the most. After all the "anchors" are set, a moderator
groups similar ones together and the participants
discuss the identified risk factors. The probability of
occurrence is determined by the number of repeated
risks and the impact by the lowest position.
The input of this practice is post-its used by each
person, while the result is the list of identified risks
associated with their probability of occurrence and
impact.
4.2.6 AVAX Storming (Core)
Based on the popular brainstorming technique
(Osborn, 1993), the practice of AVAX Storming is
focused on finding the desired functional
requirements for the system. All the participants
write a one functional requirement on a piece of
paper named Added Value Actionable Items
(AVAX). Later AVAXes are grouped in order to
sketch the system future modules.
This practice helps users to figure out the size of
their project because soon the walls start to be filled
up and the size of the project starts to grow. It is a
visual way to show users that each need has its
complexity and weight. If the project has a limited
budget, each AVAX has a section where each person
chooses if the requirement is "Needed" or "Desired".
When all AVAX are posted on the wall, each person
explains in detail their AVAX to the rest of the team
opening it to discussion.
The result of the practice is a mind map of the
identified AVAXes.
4.2.7 Buy a Feature (Core)
The objective of the practice called Buy a Feature is
to determine the scope of what will be built by the
end of a single iteration. Buying a feature with a
fixed budget is oriented to identify the top-rated
requirements. The stakeholders’ team has to buy the
most necessary requirements and define the
Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
The input of the practice is the list of required
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functionalities or AVAX, each with a price tag and
fake bills for each stakeholder.
The result is the MVP or a list of AVAXes
bought by the stakeholders’ team. The MVP is also
helpful to validate the project's feasibility.
4.2.8 Gunfight (Auxiliary)
During ActiveAction there are "rules" to be
followed, such as not to use smart phones or not to
leave the room except during breaks. If anybody
disobeys the rule, the rest of the participants can
shoot at them with NERF guns until the "order" is
restored, which is actually the objective of the
practice.
4.2.9 Time Police (Auxiliary)
The stakeholders' team chooses a person who will
play the Time police role. He or she has a vuvuzela
(horn) that is blown when somebody is talking about
a closed topic or is digressing. The objective of the
practice is to maintain discussions focused and to
watch the time.
4.2.10 Circle of Trust (Auxiliary)
The practice of Circle of Trust pursuits the objective
that anybody in the room is allowed to express their
opinions. To start a circle of trust, the interested
person rings a bell and puts forward a topic. Every
single person in the room has to express their sincere
opinion on the question without being pressured.
4.3 Non-ludic Practices
This section presents the rest of the practices carried
out during the Intensive-Day. Making a total of 9,
they have no ludic aspects included.
Preparation: planning and organizing the
logistics required for the Intensive-Day.
Opening & Welcoming: opening the day and
presenting schedule, rules and logistics to the
stakeholders.
Team Roles: introducing the teams and
explaining the roles to be used.
Concepts: explaining concepts, dynamics and
supporting tools to be used during the -Day.
Enclosing: stakeholders define initial objectives,
individual expectations and expand on the actual
reasons for being there.
Packages: categorizing needs and requirements
expressed by the stakeholders. Identified
packages are used to initially group desired
functionalities obtained during AVAX Storming
practice.
Non-functional Requirements: determining the
non-functional requirements of the desired
system. Consultants use a fixed questionnaire
based on the Pre-Day information.
Final Agreements: closing all open topics,
dispelling doubts and getting the last comments.
Closure & Raising a Toast: applying a
satisfaction survey of the -Day and making a
farewell toast.
Figure 1: Intensive-Day method diagram.
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5 RESULTS
ActiveAction workshop resulted in a successful
game-based strategy that has improved the Inception
phase of the software development projects based on
the fact that: stakeholders express their ideas freely
in an unstressed environment; simulate real-life
scenarios to identify exceptions; prioritize risks and
identify requirements in a collaborative manner.
ActiveAction has been applied in 19 projects
with the following time distribution of the Intensive-
Day: 65% dedicated to game-based core practices,
17% of resting time and 18% of non-ludic practices.
5.1 ActiveAction Advantages and
Disadvantages
ActiveAction has resulted in a powerful tool for
Entia, which started to sell it as a separate service,
giving the customer the right to choose Entia or
another organization for further construction.
The following are ActiveAction workshop
benefits identified by Entia:
Software products' origin and rationale are
known and understood by stakeholders.
Each and every of the stakeholders' points of
view are taken into account.
The whole team takes the project as something of
its own, not something imposed.
Relatively relaxed in-game environment helps to
come to agreements among many people.
Applying games helps to establish rules,
objectives and behaviors in a natural way.
Customer satisfaction and emotional engagement
is easily achieved.
The Inception phase is completed within three
weeks.
The Entia successful project rate has grown 25
percentage points, from the initial 56% up to
81%.
On the other hand, ActiveAction requires a high
demand of skills, concentration and knowledge from
the Coach, Analyst and Process Engineer roles. 12
hours in-a-row, independently of the activity to do,
requires a lot of effort and concentration, so finding
adequate pace is important. Besides, the
organization must distribute carefully their key
personnel, consultant team members, between their
daily work and the ActiveAction Days, which can
compromise other projects of the organization.
The following are drawbacks identified by Entia:
Difficulty in getting stakeholders together if they
are geographically distributed.
Difficulty involving stakeholders in the -Day's
activity due to their passivity.
Uneasiness to share opinions when the "boss" is
present.
Including stakeholders' clients into the Intensive-
Day may not always be possible.
5.2 Validation and Improvement
Suggestions
In order to get feedback on limitations and identify
opportunities of improvement, three surveys are
applied both to stakeholders and consultants. A scale
from 1 to 5 is used to rate each item, also a free
comment section is also considered.
Two of the surveys are applied at the end of the
Intensive-Day with the objective to measure
stakeholders and consultants' satisfaction. The third
survey is applied to stakeholders at the end of the
Action-Day. The grades average from the last 10
ActiveActions is summarized in Table 1.
Table 1: Surveys’ results summary.
Intensive-Day Stakeholders' survey Average
Overall experience 4.8
Achievement of expectations 4.8
Intensive-Day Consultants' survey Average
Overall experience 4.4
Stakeholders team involvement 4.7
Consultants team performance 4.7
ActiveAction Stakeholders' survey Average
Proposed Solution 4.6
Has ActiveAction benefited your
organization?
4.7
Would you use ActiveAction again? 4.8
To improve ActiveAction stakeholders have
expressed a number of suggestions: to split the
Intensive-Day into two sessions; add ambient music;
reduce the duration of breaks but increase their
number and make a summary at the end of each
practice, mainly in Buy a Feature practice.
Consultants have observed that: information
about stakeholders is fundamental to prepare
Intensive-Day; a list of pre-prepared questions about
the stakeholders' business is useful to "re-activate"
discussions; more "standing-up" practices should be
added; playing with LEGOs is not fun for
everybody; AVAXes could be created and reviewed
in teams instead of individually; Non-Functional
Requirements practice could be omitted if the
stakeholders do not have technical background; and
lastly, if the product owners are not present
Intensive-Day must be postponed.
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6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
Considering the non-techincal nature of software
project Inception activities, stakeholders can be
involved in depth and join software developer
organization at this particular moment. In fact,
addressing factors like executive support,
engagement of key stakeholders and clearly defined
needs increases the success rate of a project.
However, stakeholders' involvement is a complex
action that requires investment of extra effort and
time and be intrusive for both parties.
The strategy of using games within software
developing projects in order to address and improve
collaboration between stakeholders and development
teams can be considered as a novel and beneficial
approach. Consequently, game-based approach has
been adopted as a strategy to improve the Inception
phase outcomes.
ActiveAction is a workshop service which
objective is to clarify and process stakeholders'
needs and priorities. During the Intensive-Day,
game-based activities provide a favorable
environment in which stakeholders and development
teams collaborate and produce results of great
importance for the Inception phase of a project.
Two lines are identified as future work: (i) to
replicate the workshop in affiliates and (ii) to define
a continuous improvement process for ActiveAction.
At the moment one affiliate has replicated its first
three ActiveActions with promising results.
Moreover, documenting the method will reduce the
possibility of variation and find ways to improve.
Finally we can conclude that the inclusion of
games in such a challenging and over-whelming
activity as software projects inception, is feasible
and reported promising results which benefit both
stakeholders and software developer organizations.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank Miriam Eréndira Jiménez-
Hernández and Roberto Azrael Medina-Díaz for on-
site observation and initial analysis of the data.
This work has been funded by the GEODAS-BC
project (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER,
TIN2012-37493-C03-01), the Graduate Science and
Engineering Computing (UNAM) and the grant
scholarship program of CONACYT.
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