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Highlights • Introduction of agile team formation as an optimization problem. • Proposing expert finding models to retrieve candidates for agile teams. • Introduction of coverage, communication and optimality as quality measures of teams. • Proposing retrieval models to rank generalizing specialist (i.e. T-shaped) members. • Evaluation of proposed models on real datasets gathered from StackOverflow. Abstract Agile team formation is an important requirement of software companies. Since the members of an agile team should be generalizing specialists (i.e. T-shaped experts), we need members who are specialist in a specific topic and have general knowledge in other topics of the team. Selecting such members results in an ideal team which is flexible, high-performing and low-cost. In this paper, we define the problem of agile team formation in which given a set of required skills of an agile team, the ideal output is a set of low-cost candidates who can collectively cover the required skills while they can effectively communicate with each other. We propose two retrieval models to address this problem and then we introduce three evaluation measures for assessment. These measures are coverage, communication and optimality. Our experiments on two test collections extracted from StackOverflow demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed models in comparison with several strong baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• In this article, all 36 dimensional success factors are considered to estimate the required effort and cost to develop any Agile-Scrum based software project. • The work presented in the article computes the required time, effort and cost of projects mentioned in a data set on the basis of different inputs to the system. • For computation purposes, we divided the projects into three categories as Low, Medium and High level project for the unbiased estimation. • The datasets considered for computation purposes, also validated by experienced professionals from software industries. • It is found that the results obtained from the extended algorithm are cost-effective and less effort-oriented to a great extent as a compared to the existing algorithm. Effort and cost estimation is essential processes during software development. For agile methodologies as well, several approaches have been proposed so far to estimate the required effort and cost to develop any software system. Genuine assessment of software products is not an easy task as it requires the constant attention of the product owner. For effective estimation, we need to consider various success factors associated with all possible dimensions. In this article, we look at Scrum-based Agile projects that are developed over multiple sprints. We proposed an extension to the existing algorithm based on a total of 36 success factors; Which estimates the development effort and cost required to complete the project. For assessment and calculation, we have taken a data-set of a total of 30 projects categorized into three groups as low, medium, and high-level projects. This dataset is further validated by experienced professionals. We also compared our results with the existing approach and found that our results are cost-effective and require less effort even after considering more success factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Software scrum development. • Software cost estimation is still a complex task. • Effort estimation techniques in scrum still has some flaws that need to be resolve. Scrum methodology is the most useful and adopted part of the agile methodology. Many organizations are adopting Scrum for the last decade to meet their software requirements. It is facilitating the software industries to develop software applications according to the user's requirements. Scrum helps to fulfill the customer's requirements by interacting with the client and developer. Instead of this, scrum still has some challenges that influence the cost of a scrum. These challenging factors include coordination, team size, change request, complexity, and issues in daily meeting sessions. Due to these factors mostly the cost and time exceed scrum-based projects. To overcome these issues from the accurate and precise estimation in the scrum project we have developed a web-based software system to estimate the effort of a user story as well as the budget. There are some sophisticated cost estimation techniques for scrum-based projects. But all estimation techniques have some limitations that make them less useful for estimation and overcoming the effects of these factors in the scrum. We have surveyed the multiple software industries to get the static findings of the survey. We have designed the 30 hypotheses that main aim to reveal how much the proposed estimation technique is valuable for the accuracy of estimation. For the inclusion of participants, we have set the age criteria to get the opinions of the most experienced programmers. The main aim of this paper is to provide knowledge about key challenging factors in Scrum that cause exceed in cost and time, and also briefly explain why existing scrum cost estimation techniques are not pertinent for projects. In the last, we propose a framework as a solution to manage these factors and control cost and time from exceeding. We also adopted this estimation technique in different case studies in software industries for findings and results. The technique calculates the efforts autonomously. We design a software-based estimation technique that collects inputs from team/s and estimates the cost and time of a project. In outcomes, we found that our cost estimation approach reduced the issues from scrum software project development and make it more proficient for estimation of projects. Our proposed estimation technique introduced the new concept of estimation that facilitate the client, software industry, and developers as well to meet the requirements of the client, fulfill the changes during the sprints/s development and deliver the project within the time and cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The demands in the software industry of estimating development effort in the early phases of development are met by measuring software size from user requirements. A large number of companies have adapted themselves with Agile processes, which, although, promise rapid software development, pose a huge burden on the development teams for continual decision making and expert judgement, when estimating the size of the software components to be developed at each iteration. COSMIC, on the other hand, is an ISO/IEC international standard that presents an objective method of measuring the functional size of the software from user requirements. However, its measurement process is not compatible with Agile processes, as COSMIC requires user requirements to be formalised and decomposed at a level of granularity where external interactions with the system are visible to the human measurer. This time-consuming task is avoided by agile processes, leaving it with the only option of quick subjective judgement by human measurers for size measurement that often tends to be erroneous. In this article, we address these issues by presenting an approach to approximate COSMIC functional size from informally written textual requirements demonstrating its applicability in popular agile processes. We also discuss the results of a preliminary experiment studying the feasibility of automating our approach using supervised text mining. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• The paper presents a review of 45 studies related to software risk in the context of the software life cycle. • A large number of studies reviewed involve other knowledge areas to support decision-making in the risk management activities. • A few proposals for risk management use internationally recognised standards or de facto models to its definition. • It is especially important to define a framework and model for risk management in the software life cycle using an agile approach. • It is important that agile approaches include risk management practices which are in line with the already accepted ones in traditional approaches. Risk management (RM) plays a key role in project management, as it allows identification and prompt management of threats that may arise during project execution. Furthermore, project management within the software industry is evolving rapidly nowadays, a fact that implies new challenges, because the emergence and use of fresh approaches has brought a greater degree of complexity to the RM process. The objective of this paper is to carry out a systematic literature review (SLR) in the field of software risk, in an attempt to characterize and present the state of the art of this field, identifying gaps and opportunities for further research. From the analysis of the results of this SLR it could be observed that interest on the part of the scientific community has turned away from the definition of research work that addressed an integrated risk management process, to pay attention to work that concentrates on specific activities of this process. It was also possible to see that there is a clear lack of scientific rigour as regards the process of validation in the different studies, and a deficiency in the use of standards or of de facto models to define these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An exploratory case study of agile software development within a safety critical systems engineering environment is undertaken. • Extensive interviews are undertaken with practitioners from the organization using a combination of exploratory, semi-structured and workshop formats. • Thirteen challenges are identified in the material and related to the existing literature. • Insights as to how the company are adapting agile practices to fit a safety critical context are reported. This study explores the introduction of agile software development within an avionics company engaged in safety-critical system engineering. There is increasing pressure throughout the software industry for development efforts to adopt agile software development in order to respond more rapidly to changing requirements and make more frequent deliveries of systems to customers for review and integration. This pressure is also being experienced in safety-critical industries, where release cycles on typically large and complex systems may run to several years on projects spanning decades. However, safety-critical system developments are normally highly regulated, which may constrain the adoption of agile software development or require adaptation of selected methods or practices. To investigate this potential conflict, we conducted a series of interviews with practitioners in the company, exploring their experiences of adopting agile software development and the challenges encountered. The study also explores the opportunities for altering the existing software process in the company to better fit agile software development to the constraints of software development for safety-critical systems. We conclude by identifying immediate future research directions to better align the tempo of software development for safety-critical systems and agile software development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]