Approche de mesure et d'analyse des reunions de revision technique du processus de genie logiciel

The goal of software engineering is to define practices and methods to produce quality software on schedule and under budget. This requires from software engineers not only exhaustive technical skills, but also some knowledge in the art of managing and coordinating project human resources.;In software engineering, the software development process identifies individual and cooperative practices to be used by project team members. There are two main cooperative practices in software engineering: the working meeting and the technical review meeting. Working meetings enable specialists to identify product specifications and exchange opinions on previously developed individual solutions in order to come up with the best possible solution. Review meetings are held throughout the development process to ensure that the product fulfills the specifications. Review meeting participants go through a specific document to make sure there are no content ambiguities.;This document proposes a structured approach to observe and analyze technical review meetings from a new angle: the nature of the activities performed by individuals. Software development requires continuous individual cooperation. This cooperation must therefore influence all software engineering practices. It must therefore be possible to characterize a technical review meetings with individual and cooperative activities.;The research methodology consists in observing software professionals in their natural environment and, from the analyses, come up with a model of the practice. A new data representation scheme is proposed. Its structure is based on two distinct formalisms, linguistic and object-oriented. Linguistic proposes many ways from which meeting conversations can be described. The base unit is an individual intervention which participates in an exchange. The object-oriented formalism, by its nature, facilitates the representation of conversations. Semantic relationships between individual interventions are described using classes, hierarchies and associations. The syntax used to represent the structure improves subsequent analyses by enabling automatic analyses and measurement.;Three different analyses from the representation of the conversation are proposed: a static analysis of interventions to determine the nature of the discussions, an analysis of participants influence on the occurrence of there interventions and an analysis of possible patterns of discussions to determine likely subject of discussions during the meetings.;It was found that the technical review meeting is the scene of some cooperative work that has a major impact on a project success. The meeting enables team members to improve all proposed solutions and to bring major modifications if required. Finally, the technical review meeting is a unique platform to provide information dissemination throughout the project team. A result of this research is the relative importance of cognitive synchronization in this kind of meeting.;The formal representation used in this research may be dissociated from the method itself. It could be used as a basis for other similar empirical studies where there is a need to represent raw data in a structure format.;This research proposes a new methodology which could have a major impact on the future development of software engineering. There are two possible research directions: the use of the formal representation in the study of other software engineering cooperative practices and the improvement of the technical review meeting.