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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]

Different software development approaches (SDAs) are developed with broad portfolios of development processes. Each of the approaches has certain exclusive principles, practices, thinking, and values, which are informally represented, implemented, and improperly institutionalized. Ontologies are developed for the representation, assessment, and adaptation of SDAs separately without having a shared terminology which may lead to terminological conflict and confusion affecting the simultaneous representation and implementation in software development industry and academia. The software engineering approaches does not consider and support sustainability as priority concern. However, the approaches have capabilities of supporting sustainable software development in different sustainability aspects. This research article aims for the designing and development of an integrated ontology of software engineering approaches (i.e., agile, lean, and green) named OntoSuSD (ontology for sustainable software development) to support sustainable software development knowledge, awareness, and implementation. The goal of OntoSuSD is to propose, design and develop a formal, generic, consistent, and shared knowledge base containing semantic terminology and description of concepts and relationships generated around the representation and implementation of lean, agile, and green approaches in software development processes, which will facilitate their simultaneous implementation and assessment for sustainable software development. The OntoSuSD is developed using practical ontology engineering methodology by reusing relevant ontologies and explicit concepts and properties are defined to fulfill knowledge requirements and representations of the domain. The OntoSuSD is evaluated, and results infer OntoSuSD has high ontological design, good domain coverage, potential applications and achieves purpose of the ontology development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We live at an exciting time where software has become a dominant aspect of our everyday life. Although software provides opportunities for improving various aspects of our society, it also presents many challenges. One of them is development, deployment, and sustaining of high quality software on a broad scale. While agile methods (Scrum being one of the most prominent examples) ease the process, their popularity deteriorates the clarity and simplicity they were once meant to bring into software development. This article explores the synergy of Scrum and Essence, a domain model of software engineering processes, intending to become a common ground for software development methods, bringing clarity into the composition of methods from individual practices. This short communication motivates the interplay of Scrum and Essence, being accompanied with a set of videotutorials and 21 Scrum Essential cards to further guide more effective team's way of working. [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]

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]

The values of software organizations are crucial for achieving high performance; in particular, agile development approaches emphasize their importance. Researchers have thus far often assumed that a specific set of values, compatible with the development methodologies, must be adopted homogeneously throughout the company. It is not clear, however, to what extent such assumptions are accurate. Preliminary findings have highlighted the misalignment of values between groups as a source of problems when engineers discuss their challenges. Therefore, in this study, we examine how discrepancies in values between groups affect software companies' performance. To meet our objectives, we chose a mixed method research design. First, we collected qualitative data by interviewing fourteen (N  =  14) employees working in four different organizations and processed it using thematic analysis. We then surveyed seven organizations (N  =  184). Our analysis indicated that value misalignment between groups is related to organizational performance. The aligned companies were more effective, more satisfied, had higher trust, and fewer conflicts. Our efforts provide encouraging findings in a critical software engineering research area. They can help to explain why some companies are more efficient than others and, thus, point the way to interventions to address organizational challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]