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Practically all organizations are developing data warehousing, business intelligence, and analytics (DW/BIA) projects for achieving customer value. A DW/BIA development project may be characterized by both agile and plan-driven aspects. The reported study investigated two research questions: (1) Which factor, agile values or plan-driven aspects, contributes more toward the success of DW/BIA? (2) What are the significant antecedents of agile values and plan-driven aspects? 124 respondents engaged in DW/BIA development filled a 30-item questionnaire on seven constructs. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) method was used to determine the strength of the relationships among the following factors: technological capability, shared understanding, top management commitment, and complexity as antecedents; agile values and plan-driven aspects as mediating; and project success as the dependent construct. Based on a prediction-oriented segmentation (PLS-POS) analysis, the findings indicate that there are two groups, agile-plan balanced and agile-heavy, which represent different approaches to DW/BIA development. Top management commitment and shared understanding emerge as strong antecedents to agile values and plan-driven aspects. Overall, the factor agile values contributes more toward the success of DW/BIA development.

Context:Requirements Engineering (RE) is one of the key processes in software development. Since Agile software development advocates continuous improvement, the question arises which Agile RE practices are the most essential and shall be adopted/improved at first? Objective:Investigate and rank the Agile RE practices based on how practitioners perceive their importance for a software project. Method:We conducted a survey asking 136 Agile software development practitioners how they perceive the importance of the 31 Agile RE practices that we had identified in a literature study. We used a ranking method based on the PROMETHEE family methods to create the ranking of relative importance of the practices. Results:The opinions of respondents from a wide range of countries around the globe allowed us to determine the perceived importance of the Agile RE practices and create a seven-tier ranking of the practices. Moreover, the analysis concerning demographic data let us identify some relationships between the experience of the respondents and their view on the importance of the Agile RE practices. Conclusions:Our findings suggest the most critical Agile RE practices are those supporting iterative development with emergent requirements and short feedback loop. Moreover, in many cases, the perceived importance of practices seems to depend on the context of the project (e.g., methodology, domain). We also learned that the popularity of the practices is highly correlated with their perceived importance.

Context: In the light of the swift and iterative nature of Agile Software Development (ASD) practices, establishing deeper insights into capability measurement within the context of team formation is crucial, as the capability of individuals and teams can affect team performance and productivity Although a former Systematic Literature Review (SLR) synthesized the state of the art in relation to capability measurement in ASD – with a focus on selecting individuals to agile teams, and capabilities related to team performance, productivity and success determining to what degree the SLR’s results apply to practice can provide progressive insights to both research and practice. Objective: Our study investigates how agile practitioners perceive the relevance of individual and team level measures for characterizing the capability of an agile team and its members. Here, the emphasis was also on selecting individuals to agile teams, and capabilities associated with effective teams in terms of their performance, productivity and success. Furthermore, to scrutinize variations in practitioners’ perceptions, our study further analyzes perceptions across stratified demographic groups. Method: We undertook a Web-based survey using a questionnaire built based on the capability measures identified from a previously conducted SLR. Results: Our survey responses (60) indicate that 127 individual and 28 team capability measures were considered as relevant by the majority of practitioners. We also identified seven individual and one team capability measure that have not been previously characterized by our SLR. The surveyed practitioners suggested that an agile team member’s responsibility and questioning skills significantly represent the member’s capability. Conclusion: Results from our survey align with our SLR’s findings. Measures associated with social aspects were observed to be dominant compared to technical and innovative aspects. Our results can support agile practitioners in their team composition decisions.

This study aims to identify how traditional organizational roles are transformed towards Agile roles. A grounded theory study with 5 software teams in a large software development company in Spain was conducted. We interviewed 21 people, participated in Agile Coaching sessions and observed daily activities in the company during a six-month period. The transition of organizational roles during the Agile transformation process is influenced by many circumstances such as: higher management commitment and support, knowledge about Agile, project team size and culture. The theory demonstrates how enterprise factors influence the transition of organizational roles and how practitioners cope with the challenges during the Agile transformation process. Based on our results, we proposed recommendations and guidelines for organizational roles transition during the Agile method adoption.

This paper refines a model of Sustained Agile Usage to present a comprehensive understanding of the key factors that are pertinent to the sustained usage of agile methodologies. It describes our qualitative study which involves: (i) a focus group with twenty-nine software industry agile practitioners, and (ii) semi-structured interviews with twenty agile practitioners from five different organizational backgrounds. Data from both methods is used to develop the refined model of Sustained Agile Usage. The refined Sustained Agile Usage Model includes the following three categories: Agile Team Factors, Technological Factors, and Organizational Factors. These revisions are discussed in this research. Finally, we see implications for research: the study offers a useful complement to the few studies that have examined the long-term acceptance of agile methods. The refined model can be used as a reference model to guide future studies to understand sustained usage in different agile domains (e.g. Kanban). Additionally, implications for practice include valuable insights that can help agile teams and others (e.g. top management) to better understand and benchmark how agile methods can be effectively sustained in organizations.

Context: Software development processes are considered as knowledge intensive and therefore Knowledge Management (KM) can be applied to efficiently manage the knowledge generated. Agile practices can benefit software organizations in terms of KM. Some studies have already presented evidence about this relationship. However, the intersection of these two areas still requires further clarification. Objective: This study synthesizes research on KM and Agile Software Development (ASD) using the meta-ethnography method considering Scrum and XP frameworks. Method: In order to achieve the proposed goal, first, a diagnostic was conducted in different project domains with agile and traditional software development in order to identify the performance of KM activities. Second, the phases of the meta-ethnography analysis method were applied in a set of studies selected from a tertiary review on KM and ASD, as well as classic guides and area references. Finally, the relationships that were identified among the areas investigated were analyzed from interviews with agile development methodology experts. Results: The most common activity investigated between KM and ASD is knowledge sharing. However, in the practical view of software development companies, the attention is on how to use the generated knowledge. Conclusion: The clarification of how KM is present in each agile value, practices, and artifacts allows a reflection on how much knowledge was created, shared, and applied during ASD. Besides, such results presented in this study enable organizations to know each other better and to explore more each KM activity, thus contributing to delivering more value to the customer.

Component-based development (CBD) relies on the use of pre-fabricated business components to develop new application systems, rather than developing them from scratch. It provides an attractive alternative to more established development methods such as object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD). Given the growing demands for using agile methods for software development, we examine if systems analysts are more effective at modeling business systems by reusing business components than by reusing objects. We also examine whether the influence of component or object reuse on modeling performance is moderated by prior experience in systems analysis and design. We evaluate the representational constructs of the two based on a set of decomposition characteristics, and postulate hypotheses comparing the two based on theories in cognitive psychology and human factors. We find that models generated by reusing business components are of higher accuracy than those developed by reusing objects. An interesting finding of our study is that IT professionals who are less experienced in systems analysis and design perform on par with experienced professionals, when modeling business systems by reusing components. We argue that the decomposition characteristics of components—with respect to granularity, quality, and focus—enable less experienced analysts to perform on par with more experienced analysts.

Examines how Value is interpreted in 14 agile software development organizations.Data is collected from 13 project managers and 10 product owners.Sixteen categories of Value Aspects are identified and prioritized.The most important Value Aspect is Delivery process w.r.t. time.The most used activity to achieve Value is activities related to agile practices. The Agile manifesto focuses on the delivery of valuable software. In Lean, the principles emphasise value, where every activity that does not add value is seen as waste. Despite the strong focus on value, and that the primary critical success factor for software intensive product development lies in the value domain, no empirical study has investigated specifically what value is. This paper presents an empirical study that investigates how value is interpreted and prioritised, and how value is assured and measured. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with 23 participants from 14 agile software development organisations. The contribution of this study is fourfold. First, it examines how value is perceived amongst agile software development organisations. Second, it compares the perceptions and priorities of the perceived values by domains and roles. Third, it includes an examination of what practices are used to achieve value in industry, and what hinders the achievement of value. Fourth, it characterises what measurements are used to assure, and evaluate value-creation activities.

The declaration of the Agile Manifesto in 2001 was hailed as a paradigmatic shift in the development of software systems. Initially, agile development was typically deployed in projects with a single team with fewer than ten members. Recently, a new kind of agile development has emerged for larger projects that may be referred to as large-scale agile methodology (LSAM). The taxonomy of LSAM is more enhanced and subsumes the Agile Manifesto. Based on the software development literature, the study investigates five important antecedents of methodology acceptance: perceived usefulness, compatibility, subjective norm, mandatoriness, and external support. As a result of the initial PLS analysis, the study introduces the notion of Job-Work Fit as a second-order construct composed of perceived usefulness and compatibility. Based on a survey of 123 respondents, the study finds that the construct job-work fit significantly explains the LSAM acceptance for large projects. Job-work fit also mediates the relationships between subjective norm and external support with LSAM acceptance. This research suggests that as the stakes become higher because of project size and agility, job-work fit emerges as the central determinant of LSAM acceptance.

Self-organizing teams are closely involved in project management activities.High team involvement in project management leads to new challenges.We present the multiple levels of agile project management challenges.Relationships between challenges at different levels were also identified.Teams and managers need to address these challenges in order to be effective. Agile software development advocates self-organizing teams that display high levels of autonomy. Self-organizing agile teams are meant to share project management activities such as estimation, planning, and requirements elicitation with managers and customers. While prior literature has explored some individual management-related issues, little is known about how the high involvement of self-organizing agile teams influences everyday project management activities. Through a Grounded Theory study involving 21 agile practitioners across six software companies implementing scrum and XP, we identified a set of eight project management challenges as experienced by and as a result of self-organizing agile teams at multiple levels. These include delayed/changing requirements and eliciting senior management sponsorship at the project level; achieving cross-functionality and effective estimations at the team level; asserting autonomy and self-assignment at the individual level, and lack of acceptance criteria and dependencies at the task level. A mapping between the emergent challenges and standard project management activities is also presented. The article also shares practical implications and guidelines for agile teams, their managers, and customers for overcoming some of these challenges.

We develop a series of intervention actions to mitigate collaboration issues in chains of Scrum teams.We implement the intervention actions in a Scrum chain at a financial service provider.The interventions result in a feature delivery time reduction from 29 to 10 days.We package the intervention actions in a governance framework for chains of Scrum teams. Many enterprises that adopt Agile/Scrum suffer from collaboration issues between Scrum teams that depend on one another to deliver end-to-end functionality. These dependencies delay delivery and as a result deteriorate the business value delivered in such value chains. The objective of our study is to support enterprises that suffer from such dependencies with a governance framework that helps them mitigate collaboration issues between sets of codependent Scrum teams. We first identify a set of intervention actions that aim to mitigate the collaboration issues between codependent Scrum teams. Second, we validate the effectiveness of these intervention actions in a large confirmatory industrial case study. This study was held in a large multi-national financial institute that worked with a large number of codependent Scrum teams. Third, we triangulate the findings in three focus groups. We finally package the intervention actions in a governance framework. The intervention actions led to a delivery time reduction from 29 days to 10 days. The participants in the focus groups confirmed the causality between the intervention actions and the observed delivery improvement. The empirical results show that the intervention actions, packaged in the governance framework, enable codependent sets of Scrum teams to deliver faster.

Considerable attention has been paid to teaching Scrum in software engineering education as an academic response to the software industry's demands. In order to reinforce and strengthen the understanding of Scrum concepts, professors should personalize the learning process, catering for students' individual learning characteristics. To address this issue, learning styles become effective to understand students' different ways of learning. In this context, the meshing hypothesis claims that when both teaching and learning styles are aligned, the students' learning experience is enhanced. However, the literature fails to evidence support for the meshing hypothesis in the context of software engineering education. We aim to corroborate the meshing hypothesis by using teaching strategies matching the Felder-Silverman Learning Style Model in a Scrum course. Based on previous findings, we focused on the processing dimension of the model. To validate our approach, two experiments were conducted in an undergraduate software engineering course in the academic years 2013 and 2014. We provided students with a Scrum class by applying teaching strategies suiting students' learning style. Test results corroborate that students' outcomes improved when receiving the strategy that match their learning styles. Our data highlight opportunities for improving software engineering education by considering the students' learning preferences. Fil: Scott, Mario Ezequiel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; Argentina Fil: Rodríguez, Guillermo Horacio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; Argentina Fil: Soria, Alvaro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; Argentina Fil: Campo, Marcelo Ricardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; Argentina

In this paper we address the topic of software development team members satisfaction with their development process. We present an in-depth analysis of the results of a nationwide survey about software development in Switzerland. We wanted to find out if satisfaction relates to the applied development method, and to the use of various practices, and impacts on business, team and software issues. We found that higher satisfaction is reported more by those using Agile development than with plan-driven processes. We explored the different perspectives of developers and those with a management role and found a high consistency of satisfaction between Agile developers and Agile management, and differences with those using working plan-driven methods. We found that certain practices and impacts have high correlations to satisfaction, and that collaborative processes are closely related to satisfaction. We then explored the relationship between satisfaction and various other perspectives. Our results in this analysis are principally descriptive, but we think they can be a relevant contribution to understand the challenges for everyone involved in Agile development.

Government and academia share concerns for efficiently and effectively servicing societal demands, which includes the development of e-government software. Government-academia partnerships can be a valuable approach for improving productivity in achieving these goals. However, governmental and academic institutions tend to have very different agendas and organizational and managerial structures, which can hinder the success of such collaborative projects. In order to identify effective approaches to overcome collaboration barriers, we systematically studied the case of the Brazilian Public Software portal project, a 30-month government-academia collaboration that, using Free/Libre/Open Source Software practices and agile methods for project management, developed an unprecedented platform in the context of the Brazilian government. We gathered information from experience reports and data collection from repositories and interviews to derive a collection of practices that contributed to the success of the collaboration. In this paper, we describe how the data analysis led to the identification of a set of three high-level decisions supported by the adoption of nine best practices that improved the project performance and enabled professional training of the whole team.

We show how a large-scale empirical study using Grounded Theory has been used to study Agile transition and adoption process.An empirically-developed transition framework to facilitate Agile transformation is proposed.We describe the key structural characteristics and activities of the transition framework.We report how the inductively developed framework can be a good replacement for the previous one.We report empirical evaluation of the findings and theoretical and practical implications of them. To date, few Agile transition and adoption frameworks have been proposed in the software industry. However, using them is not easy in practice and primarily requires a huge organizational overhead because of their complex and non-flexible structure. These drawbacks make such frameworks difficult to apply in small and medium-sized companies. We have conducted a large-scale empirical research study using Grounded Theory approach with the participation of 49 Agile experts from 13 different countries. This study inductively developed a substantive Agile transition and adoption framework which appears to be simple and flexible. The main aim of this paper is to present the developed framework. The primary characteristics of this framework, including iterative, gradual, continuous, and value-based are in line with the Agile approach and show promise of being useful in software companies and organizations, regardless of size. This paper also describes how various steps of this framework could help software companies to achieve Agile transformation.

Maturity models are used to guide improvements in the software engineering field and a number of maturity models for agile methods have been proposed in the last years. These models differ in their underlying structure prescribing different possible paths to maturity in agile software development, neglecting the fact that agile teams struggle to follow prescribed processes and practices. Our objective, therefore, was to empirically investigate how agile teams evolve to maturity, as a means to conceive a theory for agile software development evolvement that considers agile teams nature. The complex adaptive systems theory was used as a lens for analysis and four case studies were conducted to collect qualitative and quantitative data. As a result, we propose the Progressive Outcomes framework to describe the agile software development maturing process. It is a framework in which people have the central role, ambidexterity is a key ability to maturity, and improvement is guided by outcomes agile teams pursue, instead of prescribed practices. Agile software development maturing process has people play the central role.Ambidexterity is a key ability to agile maturity.Improvement is guided by outcomes agile teams pursue.Pursued outcomes in practices, team, deliveries, requirements, product and customer. Display Omitted

Research literature does not suggest a practical approach for assessing/profiling Agility of software development teams or organizations.We examine the applicability of online surveys created by practitioners in an industrial case study with three teams.Surveys use different insufficient definitions for Agile, which leaves Agile as a context-dependent concept.Practitioners define Agile for their context and assess it accordingly. ContextAgile software development has become popular in the past decade without being sufficiently defined. The Agile principles can be instantiated differently which creates different perceptions of Agility. This has resulted in several frameworks being presented in the research literature to evaluate the level of Agility. However, the evidence of their actual use in practice is limited. ObjectiveThe objective is to identify online surveys that assess/profile Agility in practice, and to evaluate the surveys in an industrial setting. MethodThe Agility assessment surveys were identified through searching the web. Then, they were explored and two surveys were identified as most promising for our objective. The selected surveys were evaluated in a case study with three Agile teams in a software consultancy company. ResultsEach team and its customer separately judged the team's Agility. This outcome was compared with the two survey results in focus-group meetings, and finally one of the surveys was agreed to provide a more holistic assessment of Agility. ConclusionsDifferent surveys may judge Agility differently, which supports the viewpoint that Agile is not well defined. Therefore, practitioners must decide what Agile means to them and select the assessment survey that matches their definition.

Maturity definition in agile software development is not based on detailed process.Processes are necessary in agile maturity, but based on agile practices.Agile maturity means enabling more subjective capabilities. Maturity in software development is currently defined by models such as CMMI-DEV and ISO/IEC 15504, which emphasize the need to manage, establish, measure and optimize processes. Teams that develop software using these models are guided by defined, detailed processes. However, an increasing number of teams have been implementing agile software development methods that focus on people rather than processes. What, then, is maturity for these agile teams that focus less on detailed, defined processes? This is the question we sought to answer in this study. To this end, we asked agile practitioners about their perception of the maturity level of a number of practices and how they defined maturity in agile software development. We used cluster analysis to analyze quantitative data and triangulated the results with content analysis of the qualitative data. We then proposed a new definition for agile software development maturity. The findings show that practitioners do not see maturity in agile software development as process definition or quantitative management capabilities. Rather, agile maturity means fostering more subjective capabilities, such as collaboration, communication, commitment, care, sharing and self-organization.

Present six strategies to overcome Continuous Delivery (CD) adoption challenges.Identify and elaborate eight further challenges for research.They are based on four years CD adoption experience at a multi-billion-euro company. Continuous Delivery (CD) is a relatively new software development approach. Companies that have adopted CD have reported significant benefits. Motivated by these benefits, many companies would like to adopt CD. However, adopting CD can be very challenging for a number of reasons, such as obtaining buy-in from a wide range of stakeholders whose goals may seemingly be different fromor even conflict withour own; gaining sustained support in a dynamic complex enterprise environment; maintaining an application development team's momentum when their application's migration to CD requires an additional strenuous effort over a long period of time; and so on. To help overcome the adoption challenges, I present six strategies: (1) selling CD as a painkiller; (2) establishing a dedicated team with multi-disciplinary members; (3) continuous delivery of continuous delivery; (4) starting with the easy but important applications; (5) visual CD pipeline skeleton; (6) expert drop. These strategies were derived from four years of experience in implementing CD at a multi-billion-euro company. Additionally, our experience led to the identification of eight further challenges for research. The information contributes toward building a body of knowledge for CD adoption.

Agile approaches highly values communication between team members to improve software development processes, even though, communication in globally distributed agile teams can be difficult. Literature proposes solutions for mitigating the challenges encountered in these environments. These solutions range from general-level recommendations and practices to the use of communication tools. However, an approach covering the whole development process for identifying challenges, and improving communication in globally distributed agile development projects, is missing. In order to address this, we conducted a case study within a globally distributed agile software development project focused on using the concept of waste as a lens for identifying non-value producing communication elements. In order to achieve this, we constructed a waste identification approach through which we identified five communication wastes, and solutions to mitigate them. These wastes can help companies identify communication issues that are present in their development efforts, while the presented waste identification technique gives them a mechanism for waste identification and mitigation. This work contributes to the scientific community by increasing the knowledge about communication in globally distributed agile development efforts.

Context Practitioners and researchers often claim that agile methods have moved into the mainstream for the last few years. To support this claim they refer to recent industrial surveys which tend to report high rates of agile method usage. However many of these industrial surveys are conducted by agile consultants, tool vendors, professional societies and independent technology and market research organizations. This raises some important concerns about the possible conflict of interest and the overall trustworthiness of these studies. Objective In response to the above concerns, a secondary study was carried out. Its objective was to examine industrial surveys published in 2011 and 2012, determine the extent to which we could trust their reported high rates of agile method usage and provide recommendations on how quality of research could be improved in the future. Method Following a rigorous search procedure, nine industrial surveys on agile method usage published in 2011 and 2012 were extracted from both academia and industry. Their thoroughness in reporting and trustworthiness were evaluated using a newly proposed assessment framework based on Guba's four attributes of trustworthiness (truth value, applicability, consistency and neutrality) and a number of methods for assessing survey research in related fields as information, communication and management studies. Results The careful examination of the reviewed surveys shows that most of the studies have insufficient thoroughness in reporting and (subsequently) low trustworthiness. Only one (out of nine) study is considered as a scientific contribution in determining the current 2011/2012 rate of agile method usage. Conclusions The obtained results support our initial considerations about the trustworthiness of recent industrial surveys on agile method usage and suggest a number of recommendations for increasing the quality and value of future survey research in this regard.

The number of scholarly publications on agile software development has grown significantly in recent years. Several researchers reviewed and attempted to synthesize studies on agile software development. However, no work has ranked the contributions of scholars and institutions to publications using a thorough process. This study presents findings on top publications, institutions, and scholars in the agile software development field from 2001 to 2012 based on the publication of such works in Science Citation Index journals. This paper highlights the key outlets for agile research and summarizes the most influential researchers and institutions as well as the most studied research areas. This study concludes by providing directions for future research.

Highlights? We conducted focus group with 43 Agile developers and managers. ? We conducted 6 case studies with 33 interviews across 5 organizations. ? Results indicate 6 decision obstacles Agile software development teams face. ? Decision obstacles were mapped to show effect on decision process. ? Obstacles affect strategic decision focus, backlog and team engagement. The obstacles facing decision making in Agile development are critical yet poorly understood. This research examines decisions made across four stages of the iteration cycle: Iteration Planning, Iteration Execution, Iteration Review and Iteration Retrospective. A mixed method approach was employed, whereby a focus group was initially conducted with 43 Agile developers and managers to determine decisions made at different points of the iteration cycle. Subsequently, six illustrative mini cases were purposefully conducted as examples of the six obstacles identified in these focus groups. This included interviews with 18 individuals in Agile projects from five different organizations: a global consulting organization, a multinational communications company, two multinational software development companies, and a large museum organization. This research contributes to Agile software development literature by analyzing decisions made during the iteration cycle and identifying six key obstacles to these decisions. Results indicate the six decision obstacles are unwillingness to commit to decisions; conflicting priorities; unstable resource availability; and lack of: implementation; ownership; empowerment. These six decision obstacles are mapped to descriptive decision making principles to demonstrate where the obstacles affect the decision process. The effects of these obstacles include a lack of longer-term, strategic focus for decisions, an ever-growing backlog of delayed work from previous iterations, and a lack of team engagement.

Agile software development provides a way to organise the complex task of multi-participant software development while accommodating constant project change. Agile software development is well accepted in the practitioner community but there is little understanding of how such projects achieve effective coordination, which is known to be critical in successful software projects. A theoretical model of coordination in the agile software development context is presented based on empirical data from three cases of co-located agile software development. Many practices in these projects act as coordination mechanisms, which together form a coordination strategy. Coordination strategy in this context has three components: synchronisation, structure, and boundary spanning. Coordination effectiveness has two components: implicit and explicit. The theoretical model of coordination in agile software development projects proposes that an agile coordination strategy increases coordination effectiveness. This model has application for practitioners who want to select appropriate practices from agile methods to ensure they achieve coordination coverage in their project. For the field of information systems development, this theory contributes to knowledge of coordination and coordination effectiveness in the context of agile software development.

Modern software development relies on collaborative work as a means for sharing knowledge, distributing tasks and responsibilities, reducing risk of failures, and increasing the overall quality of the software product. Such objectives are achieved with a continuous share of the programmers' daily working life that inevitably influences the programmers' job satisfaction. One of the major challenges in process management is to determine the causes of this satisfaction. Traditional research models job satisfaction with social aspects of collaborative work like communication, work sustainability, and work environment. This study reflects on existing models of job satisfaction in collaborative environments, creates one for modern software development processes, and validates it with a retrospective comparative survey run on a sample of 108 respondents. In addition, the work investigates the impact on job satisfaction and its model of the agile practice of Pair Programming that pushes job sharing to the extreme. With this intent, the questionnaire also collected feedback from pair programmers whose responses were used for a comparative analysis. The results demonstrate that Pair Programming has actually a strong positive effect on satisfaction, work sustainability, and communication.

Agile software development (ASD) is an emerging approach in software engineering, initially advocated by a group of 17 software professionals who practice a set of ''lightweight'' methods, and share a common set of values of software development. In this paper, we advance the state-of-the-art of the research in this area by conducting a survey-based ex-post-facto study for identifying factors from the perspective of the ASD practitioners that will influence the success of projects that adopt ASD practices. In this paper, we describe a hypothetical success factors framework we developed to address our research question, the hypotheses we conjectured, the research methodology, the data analysis techniques we used to validate the hypotheses, and the results we obtained from data analysis. The study was conducted using an unprecedentedly large-scale survey-based methodology, consisting of respondents who practice ASD and who had experience practicing plan-driven software development in the past. The study indicates that nine of the 14 hypothesized factors have statistically significant relationship with ''Success''. The important success factors that were found are: customer satisfaction, customer collaboration, customer commitment, decision time, corporate culture, control, personal characteristics, societal culture, and training and learning.

In this paper we operationally define and measure tacit knowledge at the team-level in the software development domain. Through a series of three empirical studies we developed and validated the team tacit knowledge measure (TTKM) for software developers. In the first study, initial scale items were developed using the repertory grid technique and content analysis. In Study 2, supplied repertory grids were administered to novices and experts to establish differential items, and Study 3 validated the TTKM on a sample of 48 industrial software development teams. In developing the TTKM we explored the relationships between tacit knowledge, explicit job knowledge and social interaction and their effect on team performance as measured by efficiency and effectiveness. In addition we assess the implications for managing software development teams and increasing team performance through social interaction.

Representatives from the agile development movement claim that agile ways of developing software are more fitting to what is actually needed in industrial software development. If this is so, successful industrial software development should already exhibit agile characteristics. This article therefore aims to examine whether that is the case. It presents an analysis of interviews with software developers from five different companies. We asked about concrete projects, both about the project models and the methods used, but also about the real situation in their daily work. Based on the interviews, we describe and then analyze their development practices. The analysis shows that the software providers we interviewed have more agile practices than they might themselves be aware of. However, plans and more formal development models also are well established. The conclusions answer the question posed in the title: It all depends! It depends on which of the different principles you take to judge agility. And it depends on the characteristics not only of the company but also of the individual project.

Systematic review on large-scale agile transformations analyzing 52 papers.We identify 35 reported challenges in 9 categories, and 29 success factors in 11 categories.Few academic studies (6), mostly experience reports (46) identified.Challenges e.g. difficulty of implementing, integrating other functions, and change resistance.Success factors e.g. choosing and tailoring, management support, and mindset. Agile methods have become an appealing alternative for companies striving to improve their performance, but the methods were originally designed for small and individual teams. This creates unique challenges when introducing agile at scale, when development teams must synchronize their activities, and there might be a need to interface with other organizational units. In this paper we present a systematic literature review on how agile methods and lean software development has been adopted at scale, focusing on reported challenges and success factors in the transformation. We conducted a systematic literature review of industrial large-scale agile transformations. Our keyword search found 1875 papers. We included 52 publications describing 42 industrial cases presenting the process of taking large-scale agile development into use. Almost 90% of the included papers were experience reports, indicating a lack of sound academic research on the topic. We identified 35 reported challenges grouped into nine categories, and 29 success factors, grouped into eleven categories. The most salient success factor categories were management support, choosing and customizing the agile model, training and coaching, and mindset and alignment.