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Agile methods have emerged to overcome the obstacles of structured methodologies, such as the waterfall, prototype, spiral, and so on. There are studies showing the usefulness of agile approaches in software development. However, studies on Agile maintenance are very limited in number. Regardless of the chosen methodology, software maintenance can be carried out in either a local (on‐the‐premise) or global (distributed) environment. In a local environment, the software maintenance team is co‐located on the same premises, while in a global environment, the team is geographically dispersed from the customer. The main objective of this Systematic Mapping (SM) study is to identify the practices useful for software maintenance using the Agile approaches in the Cloud environment. We have conducted a comprehensive search in well‐known digital databases and examined the articles that map to the pre‐defined inclusion criteria. The study selected and analyzed 48 articles out of 320 published between 2000 and 2022. The findings of the mapping study reveal that Agile can resolve the major issues faced in traditional software maintenance, making the role of this approach significant in global/distributed software maintenance. Cloud computing plays a vital role in software maintenance. Most of the studies highlight the application of XP‐ and Scrum‐based Agile maintenance models. The study found a need for more Agile maintenance solutions in the cloud, highlighting the importance of agile in software maintenance, both locally and globally. Irrespective of the environment, Cloud computing provides a centralized platform for collaboration and communication, while also offering scalability and flexibility to adapt to diverse infrastructure needs. This allows agile maintenance practices to be implemented across both local and global environments, leveraging the cloud's capabilities to overcome geographical and infrastructural challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile software development has reached wide adoption in various countries including Turkey, even though from which its original cultural backgrounds differ. In Turkey, many organizations have started to adopt Agile approaches more and more in their software development processes. This interest in the country's software development is parallel to what the academic literature on Agile in the country exhibits. However, despite the prevalence of Agile in Turkey, there is a lack of sufficient secondary research and comprehensive review on Agile in Turkey, which poses a significant necessity for further investigation. Considering this gap, we performed a quantitative bibliometric analysis of Agile software development publications produced by Turkish organizations in a holistic and broad approach both for scholars and practitioners. We provide a summary of relevant academic studies that emerged in Agile research in Turkey by focusing on many aspects including bibliometric properties of papers, researchers, affiliations, venues, and thematic contents that are separated into 15 sub‐research questions. After delivering results based on the questions, we discuss the results and findings of our study and present implications regarding the findings. The main contributions of our work are twofold. First, the paper may help the readers to have a quick idea, understand the subject, and gain insight from a large volume of scientific data. Second, the paper can help readers to use these analyses to form future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been success stories reported regarding the adoption of agile software development methods in the industry. There also exist observations on their limitations. One of these limitations is scalability since agile methods like Scrum were originally designed for small software teams. Scalable agile frameworks were introduced to address this limitation. We conducted an industrial case study on the adoption of such a framework, called Nexus. Our study involves quantitative and qualitative evaluation based on observations within a product development organization over a period of 12 months. Scrum is used for the development of a product during the first 6 months of this period. Nexus is used in the remaining 6 months. Data are collected throughout the whole period for measuring productivity, quality, and team member motivation. Results suggest a significant increase in productivity and product quality after switching to Nexus. Team motivation was slightly improved as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise architecture is a growing trend that aims to help deal with the complexity of socio‐technical systems such as human organizations, as well as their information technology and systems areas. Nevertheless, the contribution of enterprise architecture to the field of software engineering remains unclear. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to see how enterprise architecture is used in software development and maintenance practice. To this end, we first carried out a search in the SCOPUS database and then organized the papers according to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge to determine what areas of software engineering are covered by each research study. To understand how enterprise architecture is used, we established a classification based on ISO 42010 and TOGAF. From the systematic literature review, we noticed that the early stages of development are the most impacted by the enterprise architecture. On the other hand, we observed that enterprise architecture is of assistance in the areas of engineering management, engineering processes, and engineering models and methods; these tasks are carried out by teams or managers using different, often agile, development methods or standards. In turn, we found that the most common categories are architecture descriptions; these are often used to facilitate communication and information‐sharing between different stakeholders, in addition to frameworks, which will help to establish common practices in the organization related to the joint use of enterprise architecture and software development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practices of lean and agile methods are important to manage and guide projects development in different situations. However, selecting the appropriate practices of lean and agile methods is a daunting task, owing to the availability of hundreds of practices. This wide variety of available practices bewilders potential users, in terms of the best practices that may yield satisfactory solution when applied to the project development. Lean and agile practices selection model is necessary to guide both academic and industrial experts to choose the appropriate practices for a specific project development. Thus, this study aimed to develop lean and agile practices selection (LAPS) model that presents a clear picture of how developers can use LAPS model to select and adopt different practices from various lean and agile methods. Qualitative research method (e.g., grounded theory) was used to interview 18 software developers across 13 countries. The validated qualitative analysis results showed that the proposed LAPS model consists of two main components, which are (1) lean and agile practices that include 41 best practices related to lean and agile methods and (2) factors that affect the process of lean and agile practices selection including five main factors and 17 subfactors associated with the five main factors. The two case studies conducted assured the validity and applicability of the lean and agile practices selection model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term agile is frequently used in IT especially in the area of software engineering. The broad pervasiveness of the term agile is astonishing, because it is not well defined in the area of software engineering. The fuzziness of the term agile comes with the danger of ill‐founded decisions and ideological discussions. Both slow down the gain in knowledge in the domain of software engineering. The term agile should therefore not be used either in science nor in the industry. This article provides a critical discussion of the term agile. By using a three‐layered abstraction concept for software development processes, the use of the term agile can be avoided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The importance of the team, its internal dynamics, and its performance are widely recognized within the software engineering community. While popular frameworks identify wholeness, stability over time, and smallness as important factors, they offer little guidance on how to form teams that achieve these three characteristics. The objective of this study is to investigate how these team characteristics interact in large‐scale software development contexts, particularly focusing on the impact of stable and dynamic teaming approaches. This was done through a multivocal study of literature, followed by individual semi‐structured interviews with 19 engineers from two companies and validation workshops with an additional two companies from unrelated industry segments. The study results show that the question of stable versus dynamic approaches to forming software engineering teams is largely unaddressed in industry, with stable teams representing a habitual default option. Meanwhile, both stable and dynamic teams clearly have respective strengths and weaknesses, calling for careful consideration of the most suitable approach in any given situation. To support such consideration, this paper presents a model of how team stability, wholeness, and smallness interact. This model is found relevant, accurate, generalizable, and useful by practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The software industry is a dynamic and ever‐changing environment where knowledge dissemination and ongoing learning is an open challenge, especially in agile organizations where continuous learning is essential. Organizational training covers the set of activities that drive this learning process and is one of the process areas of process improvement models like CMMI. In this paper, we discuss how the organizational training activity has been carried out at agile organizations under the lens of CMMI V2.0. In other words, we use the CMMI‐DEV V2.0 Organizational Training practices to provide an overview of how agile organizations plan, perform, and assess their training activities as part of their continuous learning process. Existing literature primarily discusses the techniques used to train and retrain employees. However, there is little evidence on how to plan training, how to assure alignment with the organization's strategic and tactical goals, and how to evaluate the effectiveness of training, which are very important challenges in the organizational training process. The paper concludes by presenting eight valuable insights identified by this research and matching them up with the CMMI‐DEV V2.0 Organizational Training practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue comprises a selected set of high quality and extended articles of the 27th Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI) Conference, held in 2020 in Düsseldorf, Germany (Figure 1). Automotive software is a relatively new, but important research field [[14]] and these two papers are directing two different but crucial challenges: SPI Implementation practices and the integration of security in the automotive software development lifecycle. EuroSPI is an initiative with the following major action lines http://www.eurospi.net: Establishing an annual EuroSPI conference supported by software process improvement networks from different EU countries. [Extracted from the article]

With years of frantic development, when release fast and release often was the mandatory rule for web technologies and services, the open source paradigm and online distribution repositories have imposed de facto standards for quality assessment in fast‐paced innovation processes. Nowadays, however, in pursuit of productivity, security, and user satisfaction, the industry is beginning, through the introduction of new standards such as ECMAScript 6 or web components, to consider software engineering mandates for web technologies. This article reports a quality model aligned with international standard ISO/IEC 25010, covering web components technology, which ultimately aims to improve adoption by the software engineering industry, traditionally wary of agile Internet practices, the open source paradigm, and public repositories. Our research also presents an experimentation platform on which end users have validated the quality properties, highlighting the implicit connection with the perceived quality. The key result of our research convinces us that user ratings are suitable as a testing mechanism for product quality and quality‐in‐use metrics in order to define an absolute scale of comparison for web component quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile methodologies are sometimes adopted, with the assumption that benefits can be attained by only using a set of best practices, which can sometimes work to a degree. In this paper, a case is discussed where a software‐producing organization of seven teams achieved significant improvements. The goal of the research was to answer two questions: how an already agile organization could improve its performance further and what is the impact of promoting quality aspects? The questions were answered by implementing interventions based on prior literature and data emerging from semi‐structured interviews. The context was an established business with a complex revenue stream structure, meaning the mix of various project/service/product based work rendered the adoption of agile methods a challenge. Action research comprising three rounds of interventions was conducted to improve the organization and its quality culture while enforcing code review practices. Interventions resulted in a significant improvement in quality, as measured by reported defects. Therefore, it is suggested that agile methods are not sufficient on their own to take software business forward unless a quality‐focused culture is simultaneously achieved through a mindset change and organizational structures to enforce quality practices. The paper contributes to research on the managerial practices of software business and agile transformation by providing empirical support to introducing formal quality improvement to the agile mix as a method for practitioners to improve organizations with complex business models and multiple teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the publication of the agile manifesto in 2001, many companies implement an agile—or at least more agile—software development process. However, only including agile methods or practices in the overall process does not guarantee being agile. The mindset of the people involved in the process, including the development team, the customers, and the management, is of particular importance. As such an agile mindset cannot be enforced, the process of creating a suitable mindset needs to be handled with care. In an interview study with nine agile coaches, we analyzed which aspects they perceive being of particular importance during an agile transformation. One of these aspects is the agile mindset. We figure out how they support the creation of such a mindset. We identify 12 categories related to the process of creating an agile mindset. These categories include the collaboration between the coach and the management as well as the necessity to internalize the agile values. The main factor for succeeding with the creation of an agile mindset, however, can be hardly influenced: The success strongly depends on the personal prerequisites and attitudes of the individuals involved in the process, mainly the development team. We synthesize the results of our study into a timeline describing the process of how an agile coach can support the development team creating an agile mindset as part of the transformation towards an agile development process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a domain‐specific software development venture at Nordea. We explore organizational constraints, challenges, and corrective actions undertaken when scaling the agile development approach of their Core Banking Platform program. The fit and required customizations of the rather complex and rigid SAFe framework in a policy‐heavy financial institution are audited against the organic growth of the program. In a qualitative study with three cycles using the Action Research method, both organizational and technical restrictions were tackled jointly with the company employees. Thirty‐four potential solutions were developed—some of which turned out to be dead‐ends. Ultimately, the effectiveness of prior recommendations was tested in a highly challenging implementation environment, and the list of guidelines was extended. We discovered several meeting and collaboration schemes that are not fully aligned with previous reports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Usage of agile methods for software development has increased in recent times. Rapid delivery of software products is ensured by these methods with less expense and high user gratification. Application of these methods on a large scale causes many De‐Motivators or challenges as initially these methods were aimed at those developmental teams that worked on small scale. However, no effort has been made yet to hand out the various correlations among the challenges. To fill the space, the Interpretive Structural Model (ISM) approach is used to reconnoiter the correlations among the De‐Motivators regarding Scaling Agile Software Development Methodologies (ASDM) from the management perspective. Creation of a framework for structural modeling association among the De‐Motivators is the aim of this study. To attain the goal, a hybrid methodology was applied based on a Systematic literature review (SLR), empirical survey, and ISM. First, we pointed out 15 De‐Motivators of Scaling ASDM from management perspectives through SLR study. Second, with the help of 59 experts from different countries, a questionnaire survey was conducted to empirically examine the correlations among the detected De‐Motivators. Further, correlations among the challenges are discovered with the usage of ISM through review of the panel, and they accomplish the categorization through CrossImpact Matrix Multiplication Applied Approach. This review focuses on surgical techniques for complete surgical metastasectomy of spinal metastatic lesions, the potential indications, and the published clinical outcomes, and discusses the future prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FinTech companies are challenging established financial institutions' dominance by offering the same products with a superior customer experience and delivering new features faster. The adoption of agile software development partially enables this competitive advantage. In response to this challenge, banks explore how they can improve their agile processes. LHV, a mid‐sized bank, uses agile practices but faces the challenge of further improvement to stay competitive with FinTech companies. In this article, we explore how LHV can improve its agile software development process. We conduct a case study at LHV where we first derive eight change proposals based on a literature review and interviews. Then, we report on how LHV implemented the change proposals and their perceived impact. Our results stress the importance of taking a coherent approach to improving agile processes by considering both business units and operations involved in the product life‐cycle. It is also necessary to align organizational structures to enable team autonomy by, for instance, decentralizing decision authority. Finally, it is beneficial to adapt agile practices to their context and have an IT architecture and technology supporting the agile approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continuous improvement of agile software processes is inevitable in order to reach sustainable and high‐quality project outcomes. In this sense, organizations need guidance on how to apply agile software process improvement effectively; comprehensive approaches with in‐depth analysis and guidelines are required to keep software processes in balance and to continuously improve them, as in a typical business process, over time. This research aims to explore the implementation of Business Process Management approach for improving an agile software process and accordingly agile maturity level. Many organizations utilize from Business Process Management approach in order to improve workflows and to discover organization‐specific weaknesses. For this purpose, the study presents a practical, flexible model based on Business Process Management approach for agile software process improvement, which also incorporates maturity assessment for measuring the agile maturity level. Furthermore, an exploratory case study with a triangulation methodology of mixed methods was carried out for implementation of the model. The research puts forward that Business Process Management approach can be used for in‐depth analysis of agile software process, discovery of problems, and redesign of the process. The research roadmap introduces worthwhile insights on agile software process improvement for researchers and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning and managing of requirement change management (RCM) process in global software development (GSD) are a complicated task, but the RCM plays a significant role in developing the quality software within time and budget. The key aim of this study is to prioritize the factors that could positively influence the RCM program in GSD context. To achieve the study objective, the questionnaire survey study was conducted to get the feedback of the practitioners concerning the success factors of RCM in GSD context. Moreover, the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) was applied. The application of FAHP is novel in this research domain as it has been effectively applied previously in various other research areas, for example, supplier selection, electronics and electrical, personnel selection, and agile software development. The results of this study will provide the prioritization‐based taxonomy of RCM success factors and also contribute by introducing the novel FAHP approach in the research domain of RCM in GSD. The FAHP approach assists the practitioners to reduce the uncertainty and vague opinions of RCM experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The volume at hand presents the special issue of the 12th International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) 2019, which was held in Montreal, Canada, from May 25 to 26, 2019. ICSSP 2019 is the latest in a series of conferences that have been organized by the International Software and Systems Process Association. In our evolving landscape, many companies are making efforts to move towards new technologies and tools, agile principles, and continuous integration and delivery. In doing so, they find opportunity, flexibility, and strength in evolving towards hybrid processes, which are neither purely traditional nor can count as textbook agile. This special issue focuses on hybrid processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product Owners have an important role in the agile and hybrid software development process. While this role is supposed to maximize the value of a product, there seem to be several scattered results on how they achieve this, as well as what actually constitutes this role in practice. To consolidate current research results and to further analyze the key attribute of Product Owners, we conducted a multi‐method research approach spanning a systematic mapping study and a consecutive case study in a hybrid development environment. The results of the mapping study states that Product Owners are communicators. We further investigated on this and used the shadowing technique to observe three Product Owners' communication activities. The results support that statement, as the gained data reveal that Product Owners spend 65% of their time in meetings. But rather than just providing the team with the necessary requirements for the product under development, Product Owners need this time to synchronize and align their work, streamline the agile process of large‐scale Scrum, discuss team‐based topics, and to solve upcoming issues addressed by the team. These results contribute to draw a more comprehensive picture of the important but yet complex role of Product Owners in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the software development projects have traditionally been faced with severe problems in terms of quality, cost, and time. Researchers and practitioners have focused on agile software development methods (ASDMs) as an alternative to overcome these problems. Agile methods employ iterative development cycles, interspersed by user feedback. Agile methods were basically developed for small development teams. Scaling agile methods is a big issue from different perspectives. De‐motivators play a key role in project management as it allows early identification and prompt management of threats that may arise during project execution. The objective of this paper is to identify the de‐motivators while scaling agile at large, from management perspectives. We have adapted SLR and applied contrived search criteria derived from the research questions, followed by selecting the required research papers, data extraction, and data synthesis, which resulted in 15 de‐motivators from 58 relevant papers. Some of the identified de‐motivators are 'traditional organizational culture', 'lack of agile experts', 'reluctance to adopt', and 'lack of management and commitment support'. The identified factors have been compared from various perspectives, such as continents, digital libraries, organization size, and so forth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software development is a complex task, and the introduction of multi‐site development teams spread across the globe makes it even harder. Requirement changes during the software development process are inevitable, and failing to manage evolving requirements is one of the contributors to project failures. Requirements change management (RCM) becomes difficult in global software development (GSD) projects due to the need to communicate and coordinate between stakeholders in a distributed environment. This research work aims to identify the factors that have positive impacts on RCM activities in GSD. We conducted a multi‐vocal literature review (MLR) and a questionnaire survey study to identify the RCM success factors. The results of the t‐test (ie, t = 0.0347 and P =.700 >.05) and correlation (rs (25) = 0.573, P =.003) indicates that there is no significant difference between the findings of MLR and the questionnaire survey. The identified factors were further analyzed in the context of client and vendor organizations to better understand the RCM success factors in both types of GSD firms. The findings of this study can provide a useful framework for tackling problems associated with RCM in a GSD environment that is significant to the progression of GSD firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software requirement engineering (SRE) is the initial stage of the software engineering process and entails several challenges relating to the identification, implementation, evolution, and management of requirements for the development of software systems that meet the desired functionality quality standards. Agile software development (ASD) is a well‐known software development process that follows a lightweight and adaptive methodology to support the incremental development of software systems. Since the ASD follows an adaptive procedure (ie, a flexible, nanostructured, and dynamic approach) of software development, it becomes challenging to perform SRE that follows a structured approach for managing software requirements throughout the life cycle of software development. The primary challenges for SRE, while pursuing an ASD, include, but are not limited to, identification of incomplete requirements, implementation of vague requirements, prioritization of secondary functional requirements, and compromise on users' involvement that negatively impacts the software system's functionality and quality. To overcome these challenges, some of the recent research efforts have focused on managing different phases of SRE during software development using the ASD. However, there is a lack of solutions that provide software engineers/practitioners with a solution. Besides, frameworks to effectively manage all the phases of SRE as per the needs of the ASD are needed. We propose a framework that unifies joint requirements document (JRD) and SCRUM to incrementally (a) identify, (b) implement, (c) evolve, and (d) manage system requirements throughout the software development cycle. We have used the action research method to qualitatively validate the proposed framework based on data and user requirements collected from a product‐focused (multinational) Norway‐based software company. The results of the validation are based on statistical analysis that reflects the usefulness of the proposed framework for SRE in ASD‐based software engineering and development. Future research is the possible application of a machine learning approach (es) in the intended context for agile requirements elicitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Majority of software development firms are adopting the concepts of global software development (GSD) in order to develop high‐quality and low‐cost products. However, the requirements change management (RCM) becomes a significant challenge in the GSD environment because of the unavailability of proper RCM framework and taxonomy. The objective of this study is to develop a taxonomy of the challenging factors of the RCM process in GSD. The taxonomy is developed based on the results of the data collected during the survey study and the implementation of the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). Total 25 challenging factors are identified and mapped into four core categories, ie, "organizational management," "team," "technology," and "process." Moreover, the AHP analysis is performed to prioritize the challenging factors and their categories. The prioritization process highlight that "process" is the most significant category of the RCM challenging factors. The taxonomy developed in this study provides a robust framework to tackle problems associated with RCM activities in GSD environment, which is significant to the success and progression of GSD firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the agile approach to managing software development projects comes an increased dependability on well‐functioning teams, since many of the practices are built on teamwork. The objective of this study was to investigate if, and how, team development from a group psychological perspective is related to some work practices of agile teams. Data were collected from 34 agile teams (200 individuals) from six software development organizations and one university in both Brazil and Sweden using the Group Development Questionnaire (Scale IV) and the Perceptive Agile Measurement (PAM). The result indicates a strong correlation between levels of group maturity and the two agile practices iterative development and retrospectives. We, therefore, conclude that agile teams at different group development stages adopt parts of team agility differently, thus confirming previous studies but with more data and by investigating concrete and applied agile practices. We thereby add evidence to the hypothesis that an agile implementation and management of agile projects need to be adapted to the group maturity levels of the agile teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Group aspects are essential to the success of software projects; however, almost no research regarding group maturity in CMMI‐DEV Level 5 organizations has been conducted. The objective of this work is to investigate group maturity and its relationship to the efficiency and effectiveness of Agile Software Development teams in a CMMI‐DEV Level 5 organization. A case study was conducted, and three data collection methods were used: a validated questionnaire was given to nine agile software teams (59 people) to measure specific aspects of group maturity, team efficiency, and team effectiveness; the effort to develop Use Case Points and a group rate (related to productivity and salary) were collected to investigate team efficiency, and focus group sessions and semi‐structured interviews were conducted with project managers and team leaders to explore group issues in software development. Aspects of group maturity were correlated with team effectiveness and team efficiency measures. Communication was found to be strongly correlated with team effectiveness and group rate, and conformity and the clarity of roles and goals were found to be strongly correlated with team efficiency. The results suggest that group maturity has a positive influence on software teams in CMMI‐DEV Level 5 organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Traditional software teams that implement agile methodologies frequently experience difficulty working efficiently as agile teams. While agile methodologies support and promote social activities and behaviors, the understanding of the social phenomena and challenges that arise during the transformation of traditional teams into agile teams is limited. We conducted an extensive 10‐month case study in a software enterprise to analyze the changes in the communication and social interactions of employees during the transformation process, and to delineate the social challenges that arise during this process. Using social interaction registers, we collected data on the communication and social interactions of employees, first when they worked as a traditional team and then as an agile team. Then, we processed the data using social network analysis methods to identify the differences between these 2 types of teams and to create graphs of communication and social interaction networks. We identified that the transformation process influences formal, informal, oral, and written communication and increases conjunctive and disjunctive social interactions. Further, from the results of interviews conducted with all the enterprise members, we identified 5 social challenges to transforming a traditional team into an agile one. The results of this research suggest that the transformation process requires broad changes in the relationships and interactions among employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Software developing organizations strive to achieve flexibility to maintain a competitive advantage. There is no common understanding of what characterize flexibility for a software organization beyond the scope of the software product. Without a common understanding, it is difficult to evaluate the degrees of flexibility of software development approaches. The aim of this literature review is to collect attributes that characterize flexibility. The collected attributes are consolidated into a flexibility framework with 3 main attributes: properties of change, flexibility perspectives, and flexibility enablers. The resulting flexibility framework is then used to evaluate Agile and Lean practices. The evaluation shows that Agile and Lean practices address many flexibility attributes. However, some attributes are not addressed, such as infrastructure flexibility and strategic flexibility. On the basis of our evaluation, the classifications of flexibility attributes that we present in this paper could be used to aid software organization flexibility evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article addresses the relationships between agile development and entrepreneurship. The objective of the study is to verify that the adoption of agile practices can promote entrepreneurial skills in software developers. In this study, agile practices were related to entrepreneurial skills, and developers of the software industry and academia professors were invited to contribute. Questionnaires were sent to the participants to obtain their opinion regarding this research. Participants also opined about the possibility of entrepreneurial skills being an observable behavior in agile culture, ie, if they are visible artifacts of agile culture. As a result, the study found a set of agile practices that promote entrepreneurial skills in software developers. That is, it was found that agile practices promote entrepreneurial behavior in these professionals. These entrepreneurial skills are sustained by the same basic values and assumptions that were learned by developers to resolve internal integration and external adaptation issues during the adoption of agile practices. In this article, an integration model has been adapted from other areas, thereby opening a new field of study involving the relationships between academic research and professional practice on entrepreneurship in the software area and agile development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Over the last decade, the use of agile methods has grown dramatically for software development. Agile methods guarantee to accelerate the delivery of remarkable software with increased user satisfaction and reduced cost. However, in recent years, due to the emergence of green software engineering, software developers are compelled to focus more on green and sustainable aspects of software. Green software engineering aims to design, develop, and use the software with confined energy and computing resources. Recently, software engineers in global software development have adapted agile methods for quick, interactive, and environment‐friendly software development. In this study, we have identified 16 success factors, through systematic literature review (SLR) and applied contrived search criteria derived from the research questions; 80 relevant papers were identified and reviewed. Findings of the SLR study were then empirically validated through questionnaire survey in global software development industry, in which 106 experts from 25 different countries participated. The findings of our industrial survey are mostly in coherence with the SLR findings. However, there is a difference in ranks of the various success factors across the 2 data sets (SLR and industrial survey). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Background: Agile development shows benefits for software‐developing companies, eg, shorter time to market or stronger customer connections. Nonetheless, agile methods and practices are most often adapted to a specific context. Especially in regulated domains such as automotive, avionics, or medical, domain‐specific constraints need to be considered, and hence, Agile is often used only partially or not at all. Objective: The goal of this study was to identify the state of the practice in using agile development as part of the development process in regulated embedded domains. Method: We conducted a study using a combination of a series of interviews and an online questionnaire as data collection methods. Results: The responses of 50 participants showed that Agile, mostly in the form of an adapted form of Scrum, has already arrived in those domains, but mainly in noncritical projects and/or early project phases. This means there is further improvement potential, which was also confirmed by the participants regarding future usage. Conclusions: The results of our state‐of‐the‐practice study provide a good stage for future work, especially for new approaches bringing more “agility” into regulated embedded domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Medical device software development organizations are bound by regulatory requirements and constraints to ensure that developed medical devices will not harm patients. Medical devices have to be treated as complete systems and be evaluated in this manner. Instead of manufacturers having to ensure compliance to various regulatory standards individually, the authors previously developed a medical device software process assessment framework called MDevSPICE® that integrates the regulatory requirements from all the relevant medical device software standards. The MDevSPICE® was developed in a manner that suits plan‐driven software development. To improve the usability of MDevSPICE® in agile settings, we extended the assessment approach. The hybrid assessment approach described here combines the MDevSPICE®‐based process assessment method with steps for prioritization of improvement needs through value stream mapping and enabling process improvement through the use of KATA technique. This approach integrates agile methods into the medical device software development process while adhering to the requirements of the regulatory standards. This paper describes the implementation of the approach within 4 organizations that develop software in line with medical device regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, the growth of medical devices and mobile medical applications is increasing enormously, thanks to the efficiency and enhancement of new technology. When it comes to mobile medical apps, developers need to understand what is required when a mobile application fulfils the definition of a medical device. Such applications have to be developed in compliance with medical device regulations. This can be a challenge for mobile medical application developers, as medical device software is normally developed in a manner that will also ensure the production of regulatory documentation that is essential to market such devices. In this paper, we identify the need for a mobile medical application development framework, the key criteria for such a framework, and describe how the results were collected through performing a Medical Device Software Development workshop. Furthermore, we describe how MDevSPICE together with an agile software development approach can be tailored to support a mobile medical applications development framework. We detail one of the key criteria for mobile medical application development framework-traceability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effort estimation is more challenging in an agile context, as instead of exerting strict control over changes in requirements, dynamism is embraced. Current practice relies on expert judgment, where the accuracy of estimates is sensitive to the expertise of practitioners and prone to bias. To improve the effectiveness of the effort estimation process, the goal of this research is to investigate and understand the estimation process with respect to its accuracy in the context of agile software development from the perspective of agile development teams. Using case study research, 2 observations and eleven interviews were conducted with 3 agile development teams at SAP SE, a German multinational software corporation. The results reveal that factors such as the developer's knowledge, experience, and the complexity and impact of changes on the underlying system affect the magnitude as well as estimation accuracy. Furthermore, there is a need for a tool that incorporates expert knowledge, enables explicit consideration of cost drivers by experts and visualizes this information to improve the effectiveness of the effort estimation. On the basis of the findings of the case study, a framework, inspired by the quality improvement paradigm is proposed to improve effort estimation in agile development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Code review in practice is often performed change-based, ie, using the code changes belonging to a task to determine which code to review. Previous studies found that 2 variations of this process are used in industry: pre-commit review and post-commit review. The choice between these has implications not only for practitioners deciding on a code review process to use but also for the development of review tools and for experimentation with review processes. In some situations, a specific variant is clearly preferable due to the nature of the development process or team. In other situations, there are conflicting opinions. So we asked: Are there practically relevant performance differences between pre and post-commit reviews? How are these differences influenced by contextual factors? To assess these questions, we designed a parametric discrete event simulation model of certain agile development processes. We validated this model with practitioner's feedback and in part also with empirical data from industry. Our analysis indicates that the best choice does depend on the context but also that there are many situations with no practically relevant difference between both choices. We identified the main influencing factors and underlying effects and condensed our findings into heuristic rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing flexibility in industry leads to an ecosystem of change, affecting the balance of processes and technology as well as the developers who have to cope with the change. Furthermore, the change itself might impact the ability to use quantitative methods to learn from previous experience. The goal of this study is to better understand the ecosystem of mutual impacts and changes of process and technologies as well as how developers perceive a technology setting and deal with its change. Therefore, we conducted a case study at Ericsson, performing a series of interviews among 6 employees (senior developers and architects). We identified a time line of changes that happened over 7 years. A set of observations about the relation between processes and tooling, and observations about developer's perceptions of the technology settings, and their strategy to deal with these changing technology settings. We discuss how the observed change impacts the ability to perform quantitative evaluations of technology and processes. The findings show that a bad choice of technologies can lead to unexpected impact on team dynamics. Furthermore, change happens so regular that it needs to be considered when collecting data for a quantitative evaluation of, eg, productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its earliest days, software development has been beset with challenges in relation to timely delivery, appropriateness of features, and quality of deliverables. Many advances in software development processes have helped to address these concerns. For example, agile software development has helped to deliver working software more frequently, and capability maturity frameworks have brought about improved consistency in quality levels. However, the age-old challenge of better, cheaper, faster software has continued to beguile developers. In this paper, we discuss an emerging approach to software development, continuous software engineering (CSE), wherein software of operational quality may be delivered on a very frequent basis, up to many times in a given day. This approach uses a complex set of independent tools that together reduce the lead time in delivering commercial-grade software. Having examined the situational context of one industrial organization applying CSE, we conclude that the approach may not presently be appropriate to all manners of software development. Nonetheless, the authors are of the view that CSE represents a significant progression in software engineering and that software development settings of all types stand to gain from aspects of the CSE approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A known problem in large software companies is to balance the prioritization of short-term and long-term business goals. As an example, architecture suboptimality (Architectural Technical Debt), incurred to deliver fast, might hinder future feature development. However, some technical debt generates more interest to be paid than other. We conducted a multi-phase, multiple-case embedded case study comprehending 9 sites at 6 large international software companies. We have investigated which architectural technical debt items generate more interest , how the interest occurs during software development and which costly extra-activities are triggered as a result. We presented a taxonomy of the most dangerous items identified during the qualitative investigation and a model of their effects that can be used for prioritization, for further investigation and as a quality model for extracting more precise and context-specific metrics. We found that some architectural technical debt items are contagious, causing the interest to be not only fixed, but potentially compound, which leads to the hidden growth of interest (possibly exponential). We found important factors to be monitored to refactor the debt before it becomes too costly. Instances of these phenomena need to be identified and stopped before the development reaches a crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change has been recognized as the distinguishing feature that makes software different from any other human-produced artifacts. Initial reflections on the urgent and unavoidable need to master change date back to the 1970s. However, despite the continuous progress that characterized software technology since, in practice, software change is still often handled as an afterthought, in an ad hoc and unprincipled manner. Agile development methods have been proposed and are now widely adopted to accommodate change during development. Recent extensions to also include operation-known as DevOps-are increasingly and successfully adopted by industry. Still, principled and rigorous foundations that can be taught, practiced, and replicated systematically are lacking. This paper argues that change has to become a first-class concept and that the development tools used by engineers and the runtime environment supporting software execution should be structured in a way that naturally accommodates change. It also provides a perspective along which several research approaches that were investigated by the community in the past decade might be integrated and extended to make this vision become true. Two main change categories are identified-evolution and adaptation-along with the forces that drive them. The paper discusses when and how the developed software can be designed in a way that it can self-adapt. It also discusses how the software itself can cooperate with humans in-the-loop to help them in their design and development efforts. Finally, it outlines a roadmap of future work needed to progress in the direction of supporting and automating software change that would lead to dependable adaptation and evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presents in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including use of Bayesian networks for assisting continuous improvement of Scrum projects, portfolio management and adoption level of scaled agile development.

Organizations are introducing agile and lean software development techniques in operations to increase the pace of their software development process and to improve the quality of their software. They use the term DevOps, a portmanteau of development and operations, as an umbrella term to describe their efforts. In this paper, we describe the ways in which organizations implement DevOps and the outcomes they experience. We first summarize the results of a systematic literature review that we performed to discover what researchers have written about DevOps. We then describe the results of an exploratory interview-based study involving 6 organizations of various sizes that are active in various industries. As part of our findings, we observed that all organizations were positive about their experiences and only minor problems were encountered while adopting DevOps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional portfolio management tools and methods are challenging for software companies that use agile and lean approaches, because of the complex pre-planning activities required. In this paper, traditional portfolio management tools and methods that have been conventionally used in industry and presented in literature are reviewed. Findings concerning their use in agile and lean software companies are investigated, on the basis of the literature review and semi-structured interviews conducted in 7 agile and lean software companies in Finland. The findings indicate that the studied companies do not use traditional portfolio management tools and methods in their entirety. The software companies adapted suitable components from traditional portfolio management tools and methods into their practices. They also apply new tools and methods to manage their portfolios of offerings, to cope with the dynamics required by agile and lean methods. The companies' emphasis is on using tools to facilitate immediate feedback from customers, to assess the value of offerings in their portfolio. The results showed a growing interest in using Kanban at the portfolio level to provide a visual overview of offerings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scrum is a simple process to understand, but hard to adopt. Therefore, there is a need for resources to assist on its adoption. In this paper, we present the process followed to build a Bayesian network to assist on the assessment of the quality of the software process in the context of Scrum projects. The model provides data to help Scrum Masters lead the improvement of business value delivery of Scrum teams. The process is divided into 2 phases. In the first phase, we built the Bayesian network based on expert knowledge extracted from the literature and experts. We used a top-down approach and reasoning to define the key metrics necessary to build the models and their relationships. In the second phase, we updated the Bayesian network based on limitations of the first version. We validated the Bayesian network inferences with 10 simulated scenarios. Comparing both versions, for all scenarios, we improved the accuracy of the inferences. Therefore, we concluded that the Bayesian networks adequately represent Scrum projects from the viewpoint of the Scrum Master. Finally, the model built is in conformance with agile methods tailoring and can be adapted to any Scrum team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regression testing repeatedly executes test cases of previous builds to validate that the original features are not affected with any new changes. In recent years, regression testing has seen a remarkable progress with the increasing popularity of agile methods, which stress the central role of regression testing in maintaining software quality. The optimum case for regression testing in agile context is to run regression set at the end of each sprint and release, which requires a lot of cost and time. In this paper, we present an automated agile regression testing approach on both the sprints and release levels. The proposed approach addresses both weighted sprint test cases prioritization technique, which prioritizes test cases based on several parameters having real practical weight for testers, and Cluster-based Release Test cases Selection technique that clusters user stories based on the similarity of covered modules to solve the scalability issue. Test cases are then selected based on issues logged for failed test cases using text mining techniques. The proposed approach achieves enhancement for both the prioritization and selection of test cases for agile regression testing. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the agile software development approaches have gained wide acceptance in practice, the concerns regarding the scalability and integration of agile practices in traditional large-scale system development projects are prevailing. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has emerged as a solution to address some of these concerns. Despite few encouraging results, case studies indicate several challenges of SAFe adoption. Currently, there is a lack of a well-structured gradual approach for establishing SAFe. Before and during SAFe adoption, organizations can benefit greatly from a uniform model for assessing the current progress, and establishing a roadmap for the initiative. To address this need, we developed a maturity model that provides guidance for software developing organizations in defining a roadmap for adopting SAFe. The model can also be used to assess the level of SAFe adoption. We took an existing agile maturity model as a basis for agile practices and extended it with practices that are key to SAFe. The model was developed and refined with industry experts using the Delphi technique. A case study was conducted in a large organization where we evaluated the model by applying it to assess the level of SAFe adoption. © 2016 The Authors. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from a classical to an agile software development procedure needs a structured and strategic roll out to realize the expected benefits of the transition phase. Quality assurance as part of the software development has also to be designed to realize its targets of the agile transition for adequate project and program quality assurance. Besides effectivity the economic aspects have to be implemented also in a value-driven agile product quality assurance. This tension between effectivity and economy will be shown on the example of the Volkswagen group IT. The transition is mapped to the SPI Manifesto to demonstrate the currency in 2009 of the established values and principles for software process improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of Agile Software Development in large companies is a recent phenomenon of great interest both for researchers and practitioners. Although intra-team interaction is well supported by established agile practices, the critical interaction between the agile team and other parts of the organization is still unexplored in literature. Such interactions slow down the development, hindering the achievement of business goals based on speed: short time to market, quick replication of products of a product-line, and reaction time for product evolution. We have employed a two-year long multiple-case case-study, collecting data through interviews and a survey in three large companies developing embedded software. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, we have found strong evidence that interaction challenges between the development team and other groups in the organization hinder speed and are widespread in the organizations. This paper also identifies current practices in use at the studied companies and provides detailed guidelines for novel solutions in the investigated domain. Such practices are called boundary-spanning activities in information system research and coordination theory. We present a comparison between large embedded software companies employing agile and developing a line of products based on reused assets and agile companies developing pure software. We highlight specific contextual factors and areas where novel spanning activities are needed for mitigating the interaction challenges hindering speed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The combination of Agile methods and distributed software development via remote teams represents an emerging approach to address the challenges such as late feedback, slow project timelines, and high cost, typically associated with software development projects. However, when projects are implemented using an Agile model with distributed human resources, there are a number of challenges that need to be considered and mitigated. The objectives of our work are multifold. First, we would like to understand the reasons and conditions that lead to the adoption of distributed Agile software engineering (DASE) practices. Second, we would like to investigate and find out the most important risks that threaten a DASE approach and what mitigation strategies exist to address them. Finally, we would like to highlight which of the available approaches among the existing Agile methodologies has been successfully adopted by the community. We intend to solidify our findings by exploring the strength of the evidence that has been reported in the literature. We carried out a systematic literature review of DASE techniques and approaches. This systematic literature review found time zone difference, knowledge of resources, lack of infrastructure, missing roles, and responsibilities as being the primary challenges that needed to be addressed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile development processes are more flexible than conventional ones. They emphasize iterative development and learning over feedback loops. Nevertheless, we experienced some pitfalls in the application of agile processes in dependable software systems. We present here the experiences we gathered in the construction of high-quality industrial software. Moreover, we will digest our experiences into a conceptual model of waste creation. This model will be refined to a case study where we take appropriate measurements in order to provide empirical evidence for it. Finally, we discuss the implications of the developed model, which helps to estimate the trade-off between agile and traditional software processes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Starting from the documentation of high sprint velocity fluctuations in a Scrum project, this paper presents a thorough approach to identify the sources of issues arising in the context of Scrum implementation. Given that Scrum provides guidance on identifying process issues but not their root causes, various approaches are explored. This is of great relevance because Scrum defines project schedules relying heavily on sprint velocity and because it is the most widely used agile methodology. The findings provide a new approach to evaluate such fluctuations and establish a more realistic project assessment than what is currently defined by Scrum. In this respect, this paper contributes to improve the understanding of the software development process using this agile framework. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Akari Software offers a family of software products supporting curriculum management in higher education. The work started with one specific commission, but within 4 years, a small product suite had been developed, with ten organisations using customised variants of those products. In effect, a product family had been created but without the underlying structure and processes needed to ensure the efficient creation and maintenance of variants. This is a common issue faced by software companies as their product range expands. In 2010, Akari began making internal changes to develop a product range infrastructure that was suitable both for its existing products and its plans for future growth. The purpose of this paper is to describe the product line transition that occurred, both to share the experience involved and to identify a number of general lessons learned. The work was supported by a FUSION project, funded by InterTradeIreland, undertaken in collaboration with the University of Ulster. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]