Search

Agile methods have been widely adopted by the industry and its teaching has seen a surge, particularly in the software development field. However, these methods have a number of limitations which affect product outcomes, such as the fact that many software development companies now use Scrum to get developers to work without interruption between iterations, rather than to maintain a sustainable rhythm. Agile experts have stated the importance of incorporating creativity into Scrum, and although there are several agile resources that help with the learning process, it seems essential to approach such learning from a practical point of view. Furthermore, none of these resources introduce creativity. In this paper, we present an educational resource in the form of a serious game that allows you to acquire all the key concepts of agile and creative methods. The game is based on the use of LEGO pieces to simulate a real project, applying the key concepts of the Scrum and Design Thinking frameworks in a gamified way. It was assessed in a professional training centre of computer science by using surveys through which participants evaluated their previous knowledge of agile and creativity methods. We analysed the improvement of these competences, as well as the general level of satisfaction with the game. After the game, the results showed that the participants' knowledge of the Scrum and Design Thinking frameworks had improved and that they were very satisfied with the whole experience. [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]

While organisations are increasingly interested in artificial intelligence (AI), many AI projects encounter significant issues or even fail. To gain a deeper understanding of the issues that arise during these projects and the practices that contribute to addressing them, we study the case of Consult, a North American AI consulting firm that helps organisations leverage the power of AI by providing custom solutions. The management of AI projects at Consult is a multi‐method approach that draws on elements from traditional project management, agile practices, and AI workflow practices. While the combination of these elements enables Consult to be effective in delivering AI projects to their customers, our analysis reveals that managing AI projects in this way draw upon three core logics, that is, commonly shared norms, values, and prescribed behaviours which influence actors' understanding of how work should be done. We identify that the simultaneous presence of these three logics—a traditional project management logic, an agile logic, and an AI workflow logic—gives rise to conflicts and issues in managing AI projects at Consult, and successfully managing these AI projects involves resolving conflicts that arise between them. From our case findings, we derive four strategies to help organisations better manage their AI projects. [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]

The issue of project management methodologies has never be undertaken by academics in the context of their contribution to sustainability. There is the lack of understanding which Agile Project Management (APM) results and Agile value creation methods are in line with the assumptions of sustainability. The article fills this gap and presents the linkage between Agile project management and sustainability. The article presents both theoretical considerations as well as the results of empirical research that explains the relationship between APM and sustainability. As a result of multiple surveys, Guttman scales were developed, which showed the degree of Agile aspects' influence on sustainability, taking into account both the results of Agile implementation and the methods of value creation. Research revealed that improving the timeliness of deliveries, increase in productivity and improving the atmosphere in the organization as APM result is significant for sustainability. Value creation methods that most correspond with sustainability are design thinking and Agile rituals. The above provide certain practical and theoretical implications. [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]

We present an empirically grounded and theoretically informed model for the assessment and mitigation of risks to effective knowledge sharing in agile development. The model is anchored in empirical insights from four agile projects across two software companies and in extant research on risk-strategy analysis and knowledge sharing in software development. We develop the model as part of the long-standing tradition of presenting risk management models dedicated to specific issues in software development and confirm its practical usefulness in one of the software companies studied. The model offers concepts and processes to assess a project's knowledge sharing risk profile and articulate an overall resolution strategy plan to mitigate the risks. The results highlight how different knowledge sharing risk management profiles can lead to different project performance outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of research opportunities that the results offer software development scholarship. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd [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]

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]

The paper discusses structure, quality and content of the currently available agile maturity models. It presents two approaches on how to deal with such models. As a first step of the analysis, the paper contains a compilation of maturity level naming used by these agile maturity models because the variety of level naming is a sign of the variety of understanding and of definition of agile maturity. While many papers deal with agile from an inside perspective, this paper is written from the perspective of Software Process Improvement (SPI) and Capability Determination, the European Certification and Qualification Association PI Manager Certification Scheme and also the SPI Manifesto. The paper does not explicitly present its own agile maturity model. The analysis approaches presented in the paper show that the currently available agile maturity models are not fit for industrial use. The synthesis of an acceptable model seems to be feasible as the analysed models address typical organisational processes including life cycle management. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In agile software development, functionality is added to the system in an incremental and iterative manner. Practitioners often rely on expert judgment to estimate the effort in this context. However, the impact of a change on the existing system can provide objective information to practitioners to arrive at an informed estimate. In this regard, we have developed a hybrid method, that utilizes change impact analysis information for improving effort estimation. We also developed an estimation model based on gradient boosted trees (GBT). In this study, we evaluate the performance and usefulness of our hybrid method with tool support and the GBT model in a live iteration at Insiders Technologies GmbH, a German software company. Additionally, the solution was also assessed for perceived usefulness and understandability in a study with graduate and post‐graduate students. The results from the industrial evaluation show that the proposed method produces more accurate estimates than only expert‐based or only model‐based estimates. Furthermore, both students and practitioners perceived the usefulness and understandability of the method positively. [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]

The culture of traditional organizations favors firmly established processes and standardization. Therefore, the adoption of Agile and Lean approaches in these organizations is a challenging issue. This paper presents an overview and outlook of the most well‐known Agile and Lean approaches in order to identify which kind of continuous software process improvement (SPI) is inherent in these approaches. The main objective of this research is to show that Lean and Agile SPI approaches can be pursued depending on the target environment, both in traditional and in agile organizations. The culture of traditional organizations favors established processes and standardization. Therefore, the adoption of Agile and Lean approaches in these organizations is a challenging issue. This paper presents an outlook of the most well‐known Agile and Lean approaches in order to identify which kind of continuous software process improvement (SPI) is inherent in these approaches. The objective of this research is to show that Lean and Agile SPI approaches can be pursued both in traditional and in agile organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]