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Despite the profusion of research about knowledge management within larger organizations, fewer studies tried to analyze knowledge management in small and medium enterprises. The study contributes to research by providing a more nuanced classification of knowledge management approaches and guides managers about the types of knowledge management approaches that should be adopted based on the size, geographical dispersion, and task nature of the organization. A purposive sample of 34 companies was selected for this study along with a survey that focused on the objective of investigating awareness and implementing strategies of knowledge management. The various phases and processes of knowledge management were accounted for. Organizations were bifurcated on the criteria like the core area of the company, the size of the company, the type of company, etc. Knowledge management implementation was judged through each dimension. Different statistical tests were carried out to test a set hypothesis. Having established that wide variation in overall adoption of knowledge management practices exists across the software engineering organizations, the different characteristics associated with knowledge management adoption were tested: organization size in terms of employee strength, the domain of the software engineering, team distribution, and type of organization. To a surprise, most of the organizational characteristics are not found in the significantly associated with knowledge management adoption except knowledge management adoption level in full and partial agile organizations and the relationship between the organization KM level and the number of software developers in organization for only product development companies is found significant. Opposite to the claims of many researchers, this study does not find any significant difference between knowledge management adoptions between distributed and co-located agile teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The competition in the software market demands that the time required for any software product to reach the market be reduced if the product is to survive competition from other developers. The pursuit of this goal has led to the adoption of agile software development methodologies. While other agile methodologies provide guidelines as to the software engineering (SE) practices to be used during the development lifecycle, Scrum does not. The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to identify the usage and level of importance of software engineering practices in the Scrum development environment; and second, to investigate how Scrum teams adopt an appropriate set of SE techniques and whether a hybrid Scrum/Extreme Programming (XP) methodology is an appropriate approach to take. This research was conducted by examining sample data from five organizations using the Scrum methodology. The sample included a range of industries including communications and embedded systems, financial asset management, software development houses and consulting firms in South Africa. The study employed a mixed method approach. A key finding was that, regardless of the fact that Scrum does not explicitly recommend engineering practices, there was extensive use of these practices by all of the participating organizations. The study also found that the lack of software engineering practices in Scrum does not constitute a barrier to a successful adoption of Scrum, provided the 'inspect and adapt' principle inherent in Scrum is properly followed. The study discusses the findings, explains the implications and suggests future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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(1) Background: User stories are widely used in Agile development as requirements. However, few studies have assessed the quality of user stories in practice. (2) Methods: What is the quality of user stories in practice? To answer the research question, we conducted a case study. We used an analysis report from a real-life project where an organization wanted to improve its existing hotline system or acquire a new one. We invited IT practitioners to write requirements for the new system based on the analysis report, user stories, and whatever else they considered necessary. The practitioners could ask the authors questions as they would ask a customer in a real setting. We evaluated the practitioners' replies using these IEEE 830 quality criteria: completeness, correctness, verifiability, and traceability. (3) Results: The replies covered only 33% of the needs and wishes in the analysis report. Further, the replies largely missed other requirements needed in most projects, such as learnability and maintainability. Incorrect or restrictive solutions were often proposed by the practitioners. Most replies included user stories that were hard to verify, or would have caused a cumbersome user interface if implemented independently. (4) Conclusion: In this project, relying on the user stories would have been a disaster. Although the user stories could have been improved, they wouldn't cover the necessary requirements in the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile software development methods were introduced to minimize problems faced using traditional software development approaches. There are several Agile approaches used in developing software projects, these include Scrum, Extreme programming and Kanban. An Agile approach focuses on collaboration between customers and developers and encourages development teams to be self-organizing. To achieve this there are different Agile practices teams choose to use in their projects. Some teams only use one practice whilst others use a combination of practices. The most common practices used are stand-ups, user stories, Burndown chart/Burnup chart, pair programming, Epic and User stories. This paper reports on the analysis of the data collected from people involved in Agile software development teams and identifies that the combination of practices in Agile software development have an impact on the communication in the team, project requirements and project priorities, with more practices being adopted correlating with better project outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been a number of software development processes. Based on their advantages and disadvantages, they are accepted and utilized. But none of the development process can be claimed to be suitable to all the projects as the development context/scenarios differ. Therefore, there is a need to model the software development process based on the on-going situations. In this paper, we define and develop a software development process that uses Micro Service Architecture and DevOp culture for Extreme Programming (XP). The proposed software development process can be used for large, complex and geographically distributed software system. A literature review was conducted to understand the currently used software development process and architectures in extreme programming. Nevertheless, in practice, theusage of extreme programming in large scale companies/systems is not known. This study aims to evaluate the impact of the usage of XP process on the development of large-scale distributed systems, while taking online shopping services as a case study. A case study is conducted in an organization that develops software that are large-size and complex by modifying the extreme programming. Questionnaires were prepared and qualitative analysis was carried out. The case study aided in learning about the effectiveness of combining XP with DevOp. Further, outcomes of Crystal-Clear Methodology that depends on people rather than processes and Extreme Programming were compared. As a result of this process, XP can handle large, complex and geographicaldistributed software systems. Developed software becomes much faster, cost effective, loosely coupled, deployable across the globe. It is observed that practices of Extreme Programming when adaptedin the project gives rise to output like people factor and also helpscreating ideas and solutionsfor complex design issues. This is the approach for conceptualization and implementation of overall systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile software development is an iterative, incremental, and evolutionary approach to managing software development that is relatively common in the commercial sector. With the objective of reducing development time and responding to changing requirements on faster cycles, military programs are increasingly adopting Agile as part of their acquisition strategy. Adapting Agile methods for military systems, which often have unique requirements, requires careful consideration and a shift in traditional test and evaluation methods. This paper describes the challenges of test and evaluation of Agile software and suggests several ways of addressing those challenges, including embedding testers with development teams. A cautionary note regarding the criticality and complexity of military systems is offered along with the importance of safe, effective, and efficient tools for risk management. We include examples and lessons from the test and evaluation of several Air Force Agile software projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased demand for information systems drives businesses to rethink their customer needs to a greater extent and undertake innovation to compete in the marketplace. The design thinking (DT) is a human-centered methodology leads to creativity and innovation. The agile applications development such as extreme programming (XP) as a rapid application development approach tends to focus on perfecting functionality requirement and technical implementation. However, it causes significant challenges to building software/applications to meet the needs of end-user. This study integrates DT practices into XP methodology to improve the quality of software product for the end-users and enable businesses to achieve creativity and innovation. The proposed integrated DT@XP framework presents the various DT practices (empathy, define, persona, DT user stories) are adapted into XP exploration phase, prototyping and usability evaluation into XP planning phase. Our work demonstrates the applicability of DT concepts to analyze customer/user involvement in XP projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examined the use of digital diary as a tool for enhancing parental school involvement in Tanzania. The development of the digital diary followed eXtreme Programming agile method where 87 parents and 6 teachers from St. Florence school were involved. Parents and teachers were given six months to use the tool before testing for its effectiveness using data from 7 teachers and 156 parents through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires respectively. The study found that the majority of respondents (84.4% of parents and 96.7% of teachers) indicated that the digital diary was useful tool as enabled them to track children's progress via their smartphones. Moreover, computer generated reports showed that messages to/from parents were delivered with approximately 90% success rate. This research argues for schools to adopt and use digital diaries for easy, engaging, and effective for better parental school involvement [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is essential to use multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methods to evaluate human judgments, for decision problems requiring the measuring of tangible and intangible criteria. Among the MCDM techniques, the analytic hierarchical process (AHP) and its extended version, the analytic network process (ANP) are the most powerful methodologies for ranking options and alternatives. They have been utilized by many scientists and researchers in numerous fields, especially for complex engineering problems. Both tools allow leaders to structure their issues numerically utilizing individual judgments. In this article, it is suggested that the MCDM can be useful in agile processes where complicated decisions happen routinely. This paper shows the ranking of the extreme programming (XP) estimation methods using AHP and ANP in educational and industrial environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In much of extant research on design cooperation, design materials are approached from noun-oriented ontologies and social topologies where the notion of ‘object’ is central. There is a long history of critique concerning such ontologies, most recently coming from the anthropology of making, because they are failing to capture the dynamic and fluid aspects that characterize the living, constantly changing world that we inhabit. Though often recognized, the implications these critiques have for design cooperation research and practice have been drawn only to a limited extent. In this study, we discuss and empirically examine such implications by adopting a fluid ontology in the analysis of design cooperation. We use data from design conversations in a firm that practices extreme programming, a form of agile software development, to exhibit what theorizing design activity in terms of fluid things, fluid spaces, and continuity has to offer to practitioners and analysts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile development methods were believed to best suit small, co-located teams, but the success in small teams has inspired use in large and very large-scale software development. However, fundamental assumptions of agile development are challenged when applying the methods at a very large scale. An interpretative revelatory case study on one of the largest software development programmes in Norway shows how agile methods were adapted and complemented with practices from traditional methods to handle the scale. The programme ran over four years with 12 co-located development teams and a total of 175 people involved. The case study was conducted retrospectively using group interviews with 24 participants and documents. Findings on key challenging areas are reported: customer involvement, software architecture, and inter-team coordination. The revelatory study also suggests refinements of a research agenda for very large-scale agile development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile software development methods are mostly built as a set of managerial guidelines and development concepts on how to handle a software development but are not bounded to software development paradigms like object or agent orientation. Some methods, like eXtreme Programming and SCRUM are driven by operational requirements representation models called User Stories. These User Stories can be used as an anchoring point to agile methods; this means that we could take a User Stories set to drive a software transformation approach embedded in a particular development paradigm. This paper presents a process fragment for Multi-Agent Systems development with agile methods based on User Stories sets. The process fragment indeed takes advantage of an initial set of User Stories to build a reasoning model (called the Rationale Tree; typically several of these are built for a single project) that documents decompositions and means-end alternatives in scenarios for requirements realization. A Rationale Tree can then be aligned with a Multi-Agent design and implemented in an agent-oriented development language. In this paper the transformation is targeted to the JAVA Agent DEvelopment (JADE) framework. The process fragment (at least partially) covers the Requirements Analysis, Multi-Agent System Design and Multi-Agent System Implementation phases. Transformation from one phase to the other is overseen and illustrated on an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile means quick moving and agility means the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly. The Agile methodology focuses on the delivery of valuable software. Even small IT software organizations are directing towards agile methodologies for better performances as these methods were especially designed for new start-up organizations. IT project management according to the agile principles will be less effective if the space where the teams work is not arranged. This Research Paper focuses on the use of Scrum and with the help of extreme programming; we have tried to find the user stories for the project ONLINE PRINTING SERVICES which will be useful for further project estimations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need of the current Software industry is changing rapidly, and the demand is ever increasing. The industry needs to provide the solution to this demand. As the software development proceeds, factors such as requirements, needs, priorities, underlying technology may change. Thus development process must be highly dynamic and a good software development methodology must adapt to these evolving and changing requirements. Traditional software development models are unable to handle such dynamic requirements. However, there are many new development models introduced in context to provide satisfactory solutions to increasing needs of the industry. Comparison between different new software development methods will help in the selection of appropriate development model in a particular scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scrum has become popular among the agile methodologies due to the substantial support that it provides to the project management teams. The scrum process delivers quick functionality in the form of sprints. Most of the quality assurance and quality control activities are skipped in scrum because of its short lifecycle and due to the absence of a dedicated quality assurance team. The development team pays more attention to delivery of products according to the customer satisfaction, and the parameters used for this type of assessment are the story success criteria and user acceptance testing. Only acceptance testing and integration testing are not sufficient to achieve a quality product. There is still a clamouring need felt to incorporate other quality control activities in scrum to achieve a quality product. In this work, we have made an attempt to implement the quality control activities in the scrum philosophy by introducing the concept of test backlog. The enhanced scrum model provides quality assessment methodology on the basis of frequency of remaining functional bugs. The concept of test backlog proposed in this study aims at implementing state of the art testing process in scrum. A case study was carried out to validate the model, which produced satisfactory results. Besides, we conducted a survey to access the state of the quality control in scrum. The proposed model and case study results are reported herein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Requirement Engineering is an essential process during software product development, it become more important when requirement is changing rapidly throughout the development process. In traditional development strategies requirements are kept initially and referenced by different stakeholders in later stage of development according to their use but this job is become toughest when requirements are volatile. In this article we studied about Agile Development Methodologies and strive to seek the relation with Requirement Engineering Techniques which are strongly rely on the concept of "No Change in Requirement" after Requirement Analysis phase and try to implement RE in Agile Software development process like XP and SCRUM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1990s, a new software development approach named “agile”, suggested new methodologies for projects of relatively short duration and changing requirements. Such software projects which start with uncertain requirements are considered risky under classical approaches, but they became fairly successful by using these newer methods. Agile methods favor working software to detailed documentation, they are open to change and they prefer strong interaction with customers. This study reports the results of a project development effort deriving its development process from different agile methods adapted for the circumstances. The project aims to develop a university automation system by a software team which was initially unfamiliar with the agile software development approach and internet based programming technologies. We describe how to tailor and implement the chosen practices from the different agile methods, which challenges were addressed during the implementation, and the ways to solve these challenges. Furthermore, we comment on the experience gained and make recommendations on the implementation of these practices.