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This special issue addresses lean software development. What principles deliver value, and how are they introduced to best manage change? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explains the impact of agile software development on industrial software development practices. The author mentions that agile software development does not pay sufficient attention to software architecture. He cites that this method applies to domains such as automobiles, telecommunications, finance and medical devices which require large software intensive systems. Also cited are multiple levels to understanding the conflict between agile development and architecture.

Software engineering (SE) research lacks theory and methodologies for addressing human aspects in software development. Development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processing activities. Affects (emotions, moods, and feelings) have a linkage to cognitive processing activities and the productivity of individuals. SE research needs to incorporate affect measurements to valorize human factors and to enhance management styles. The objective of this study is to analyze the affects dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance of software developers and their real-time correlation with their self-assessed productivity (sPR). A repeated measurements design was conducted with eight participants (four students and four professionals), conveniently sampled and studied individually over 90 min of programming. The analysis was performed by fitting a linear mixed-effects (LME) model. The results showed that valence and dominance are positively correlated with the sPR. The model was able to express about 38% of deviance from the sPR. Many lessons were learned when employing psychological measurements in SE and for fitting LME. This article demonstrates the value of applying psychological tests in SE and echoes a call to valorize the human individualized aspects of software developers. It reports a body of knowledge about affects, their classification, their measurement, and the best practices to perform psychological measurements in SE with LME models. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies show that software developers' happiness pays off when it comes to productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presents in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including use of Bayesian networks for assisting continuous improvement of Scrum projects, portfolio management and adoption level of scaled agile development.

An impressive number of new startups are launched every day as a result of growing new markets, accessible technologies, and venture capital. New ventures such as Facebook, Supercell, Linkedin, Spotify, WhatsApp, and Dropbox, to name a few, are good examples of startups that evolved into successful businesses. However, despite many successful stories, the great majority of them fail prematurely. Operating in a chaotic and rapidly evolving domain conveys new uncharted challenges for startuppers. In this study, the authors characterize their context and identify common software development startup practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Microblogging is a popular form of social media that has quickly permeated both enterprise and open source communities. However, exactly how open source communities can leverage microblogging isn't yet well understood. The authors investigate how Drupal's open source community uses Twitter, a household name in microblogging. Their analysis of group and individual accounts of Drupal developers reveals that they take on similar but distinct roles. Both serve as communicators of essential links to a vast and growing community knowledge base, such as work artifacts, issues, documentation, and blog posts, but community members often express positive emotions when tweeting about work, which reinforces a sense of community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]