A study of software engineering practices performed in Sri Lankan software companies

Abstract

A collection of concepts, principles, methods and tools which are used in software engineering (SE) industry is known as the SE practices and they are important to work with the software development life cycle (SDLC). Delivering high quality products within budget limits and on time is a comprehensive problem and a very big challenge in the information technology sector and also software engineers make failures while they try to develop software. Drawbacks in existing software practices and not choosing appropriate practices may cause above problems. The aim of this study is to analyses the characteristics of SE practices exercised by the Sri Lankan software development industry, to identify the interrelationship between those practices and describe the challenges of those SE practices. Initially, a mapping study was performed on five electronic databases to find the past related studies and the research gap. Then an empirical study was conducted as a survey study for 148 numbers of software engineers in randomly selected software companies in Sri Lanka and collected data was analyzed using statistical software. According to the results, the most popular target sector are information technology and telecommunication and most popular software types are web application and mobile application. Agile software development methodology is new and widely used in Sri Lankan software industries. Requirement documentation is the main requirement engineering practice. Testing all features independently by a testing team is used in testing related practices. Manual testing is used more than automation testing. Insufficient documentation is challenge to the software maintenance phases. Most organizations are using project planning, tracking, and risk management tool and significant correlation was found between sub factors of factor requirement, design, development, testing separately. The results of the study conclude that strength and weakness of SE practices in Sri Lankan context.