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In order to adopt specific agile methods and to accommodate lean principles, many organizations need to tailor their processes. Different frameworks supporting and guiding the agile transition and adoption process exist in the literature. However, there is a demand for specific guidelines on the different circumstances influencing agile adoption. This paper provides a Systematic mapping of the available frameworks, issues and factors affecting a successful agile transition and adoption process. Twenty-eight primary studies have been considered. The results are presented according to the three research questions. Firstly, nine systematic approaches and frameworks for agile transition and adoption are analyzed. Secondly, different issues related to the agile transition and adoption process are gathered, compared and synthesized in the following five categories: pre-transformation activities, obstacles and results, stages and activities, agile practices and situational factors. Finally, a list of 154 situational factors affecting the agile transition and adoption process is proposed.

See RECORDING (starts at 00:30:30). In an attempt to increase the reproducibility of contributions to a long-running and established geospatial conference series, the 23rd AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science 2020 (https://agile-online.org/conference-2020) for the first time provided guidelines on preparing reproducible papers (Nüst etal., 2020) and appointed a reproducibility committee to evaluate computational workflows of accepted papers ( https://www.agile-giscience-series.net/review_process.html). Here, the committee’s members report on the lessons learned from reviewing 23 accepted full papers and outline future plans for the conference series. In summary, six submissions were partially reproduced by reproducibility reviewers, whose reports are published openly on OSF ( https://osf.io/6k5fh/). These papers are promoted with badges on the proceedings’ website (https://agile-giss.copernicus.org/articles/1/index.html). Compared to previous years’ submissions (cf. Nüst etal. 2018), the guidelines and increased community awareness markedly improved reproducibility. However, the reproduction attempts also revealed problems, most importantly insufficient documentation. This was partly mitigated by the non-blind reproducibility review, conducted after paper acceptance, where interaction between reviewers and authors can provide the input and attention needed to increase reproducibility. However, the reviews also showed that anonymisation and public repositories, when properly documented, can enable a successful reproduction without interaction, as was the case with one manuscript. Individual and organisational challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the conference’s eventual cancellation increased the teething problems. Nevertheless, also under normal circumstances, future iterations will have to reduce the reviewer’s efforts to be sustainable, ideally by more readily executable workflows and a larger reproducibility committee. Furthermore, we discuss changes to the reproducibility review process and their challenges. Reproducibility reports could be made available to “regular” reviewers, or the reports could be considered equally for acceptance/rejection decisions. Insufficient information or invalid arguments for not disclosing material could then lead to a submission being rejected or not being sent out to peer review. Further organisational improvements are a publication of reviewers’ activities in public databases, making the guidelines mandatory, and collecting data on used tools/repositories, spent efforts, and communications. Finally, we summarise the revision of the guidelines, including their new section for reproducibility reviewers, and the status of the initiative “Reproducible Publications at AGILE Conferences” (https://reproducible-agile.github.io/initiative/), which we connect to related undertakings such as CODECHECK (Eglen etal., 2019). The AGILE Conference’s experiences may help other communities to transition towards more open and reproducible research publications.

R&D offshoring involves the relocation of in-house R&D activities to subsidiary units located in other countries, often associated with low-cost engineering work, to meet global operational requirements. The main motivation behind R&D offshoring by global technology companies is usually to utilize local resources, knowledge, and competencies provided by geographically dispersed subsidiaries in the most effective manner, which in most cases involves high expectations for project performance. However, offshore units often have their own local interests, such as developing their activities to compete with the company's other global R&D units, by not only building their project performance, but also demonstrating learning and innovativeness. This causes a learning paradox in which the R&D unit is expected to possess capabilities for innovation and learning, while at the same time demonstrating a high product development performance. This paper presents a qualitative case study that analyzes how R&D managers in the offshore units of a global technology company can cope with conflicting tensions between learning and performance. The results present a variety of coping practices that are based on developing local innovation strategies, constant learning, and supporting local innovation culture. The results also underline the meaning of agile working models in facilitating local innovation activities.

Despite its weaknesses, peer review is our best gatekeeper of rigorous science. With the advent of on-line and open-access publishing, a vigorous debate has ensued over the timeliness of peer review. Many of us remember, and some still face, long peer review and publishing timeframes. Ware and Mabe (2015) estimated that a reviewer needs from several hours to a day to carefully prepare a peer review. Even so, the time from submission to first decision varies from 8 weeks to 18 weeks and varies by academic discipline and journal. Although the slowness of the peer review process has been critiqued (Lotriet, 2012), long ingrained processes have been slow to change. The development of the open access publishing has brought to the forefront the need to speed the peer review process and reduce the time to publication. However, short peer review times have been cited as one of the hallmarks of predatory journals (Cobey at al. 2018). Some have suggested that a faster and more agile peer review process may undermine the quality of published research (Bagdasarian et al. 2020).

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has been adopted by a large number of organizations to scale agile to large enterprises that develop software. At the moment, SAFe seems to be the most predominant agile scaling framework. Despite the current popularity of SAFe in the software intensive industry, there exists surprisingly little research on the adoption and usage of SAFe. To study what is known about SAFe with respect to benefits and challenges of its usage, we conducted a multivocal literature review. The preliminary version of the results are presented in this poster version of paper. We identified 48 unique adoption cases in 46 organizations from both peer reviewed and non peer reviewed (grey literature) sources.

The subject of this study was the product development project creating a new innovative proof-of-concept (POC) prototype device that could control a connected industrial overhead crane in order to perform automatic or semi-automatic high precision lifts within a limited time frame. The development work focused on innovating a new measuring concept, which was parallel to finding suitable sensors for the application. Furthermore, the project resulted in a closed loop control system with Industrial Internet connected sensors and a user interface for factory workers. The prototyping journey is depicted to illustrate the decisions made during the product development project to contribute to both the pragmatic and the process discussion in the field of Industrial Internet. The purpose of this research was to explore and generate hypotheses for how new applications should be developed for heavy industry connected devices. The research question is: what are the implications of applying agile product development methods, such as Wayfaring, to heavy industrial machinery and Industrial Internet -based problems? The methodologies used in this paper, in addition to developing the device, are case study research and hypotheses generated from case studies. The hypotheses generated include that it is also possible to prototype large size connected machinery with low-cost and in a short time, and investment decisions for heavy Industrial Internet products become easier with concrete data from proof-of-concept prototypes by creating knowledge about the investment risk and the value proposition.

Coordination of work teams is critical when managing large programmes that involve multiple teams. Prior studies of knowledge work indicate that such work relies heavily on coordination through "personal" modes such as mutual adjustment between individuals or through scheduled or unscheduled meetings. We studied how coordination through scheduled and unscheduled meetings change over time in two large software development programmes. Findings include transitions from scheduled to unscheduled meetings and from unscheduled to scheduled meetings. The main implication is that programme management needs to be sensitive to the vital importance of coordination as well as the coordination needs as they change over time. © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

As agile software development principles and methods are being adopted by large software product organizations it is important to understand the role of software entropy. That is, how the maintainability of a system may degrade over time due to continuous change. This may on one side affect the ability to act agile in planning and development. On the other side, an agile process may affect growth of entropy. We report from a case study of a successful software product line organization that has adopted the agile development method Evo, showing how agility and entropy are negatively related. We conclude this study by suggesting a two-step approach to manage entropy while maintaining process agility. First, the system needs to be restructured to establish a level of manageable entropy, and then, that the agile process must be complemented with continuous semi-automated quality monitoring and refactoring support. © 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.