Information technology service management: an experimental approach towards IT service prediction

• Author(s): Caldeira, João Carlos Palmela Pinheiro
• Date: 2009
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/2075
• Origin: Repositório Institucional da UNL
• Subject(s): Empirical software engineering; ITIL; Incident management; IT service management
• Document Type: Master thesis
• Language: English
• Advisor(s): Abreu, Fernando
• Contributor(s): RUN

Description

Dissertation presented to obtain a Masters degree in Computer Science

Software development and software quality improvement have been strong topics for discussion in the last decades. Software Engineering has always been concerned with theories and best practices to develop software for large-scale usage. However, most times those theories are not validated in real live environments. Therefore, the need for experiments is immense. The incidents database can be an important asset for software engineering teams. If they learn from past experience in service management, then they will be able to shift from a reactive approach to a more proactive one. The main goal of this dissertation is shedding some light on the influential factors that affect incidents lifecycle, from creation to its closure, and also to investigate to what accuracy the ARIMA models are a valid approach to model and predict not only the ITIL incident management process, but also other ITIL processes and services in general. The dissertation presented herein is on the crossroads of Empirical Software Engineering and of the emerging area of Services Science. It describes an experiment conducted upon a sample of incident reports, recorded during the operation of several hundred commercial software products, over a period of three years (2005-2007), on six countries in Europe and Latin America. The incidents were reported by customers of a large independent software vendor. The primary goal of an Incident Management process is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained. As a result of this, a software company can make use of a good incident management process to improve several areas of their business, particularly product development, product support, the relation with its customers and their positioning in the marketplace. The underlying research questions refer to the validation of which are the influencing factors affecting the incidents management lifecycle, and also aims at finding the existence of patterns and/or trends in incident creation and resolution based on a time series approach. Additionally, it presents the estimation, evaluation and validation of several ARIMA models created with the purpose of forecasting upon incident resolution based on incident creation historic data. Understanding causal-relationships and patterns on incident management can help software development organizations on optimizing their support processes and in allocating the adequate resources; people and budget.