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Context: Agile maturity models (AMMs) have been proposed to provide guidance for adopting Agile practices. Evaluations of AMMs indicatethat they might not be suitable for industry use. One issue is that AMMs have mainly been evaluated against pre-defined sets of criteria, instead of industry practice. Objectives: The objectives of this study are to: (1) compare current AMMs regarding their guidance for Agile adoption, (2) investigate the strategies for Agile adoption used by practitioners, and (3) investigate similarities and differences between (1) and (2). Methods: We conducted a literature survey that included grey literature to identify strategies proposed by the AMMs. We also conducted a survey and 11 interviews to identify the strategies used by practitioners to introduce Agile practices. This study combines quantitative and qualitative analysis. Results: From the literature survey we found 26 AMMs, whereof 12 provide explicit mappings of Agile practices to maturity levels. These mappings showed little agreement in when practices should be introduced. Based on 40 survey responses we identified three high-level strategies for introducing Agile practices: big-bang, incremental, and complex strategies. The survey andinterviews revealed that the guidance suggested by AMMs are not aligned well with industry practice and that Agile practices might already be in place before an organization starts a transition to Agile. Conclusion: In their current form, AMMs do not provide sufficient information to guide Agile adoption in industry. Our results suggest that there might be no universal strategy for Agile adoption that works better than others.

Agile software development has become increasingly popular over the past years. Agile methods are perceived to address challenges caused by the rapid change in the market while reducing time to market and development. As the popularity of Agile method is growing, the need for Agile adoption guidance also increases. Over the past years, Agile Maturity Models (AMMs) have been proposed to offer guidelines in Agile adoption. Agile maturity models (AMMs) suggest that Agile practices are introduced in a specific order. However, a number of evaluations of AMMs show that they are not properly validated and not suited for use in industry. Current evaluations of AMMs are based on certain criteria and not based on empirical studies. There are no studies that evaluate AMMs' suggestion to introduce Agile in certain order against industry practice. The relevance of the AMMs in the industry is not yet examined. In this study, we conducted a literature review to identify the order of Agile practice introduction mentioned in AMMs. We then compared the AMMs' suggestions to the strategies used by practitioners, which we elicited from a survey and a series of interviews. The literature survey revealed 12 AMMs which provide explicit mappings of Agile practices to maturity levels. These mappings show that the AMMs are not in agreement pertaining to the which practice is to be included in which maturity levels. The AMMs do not provide clear information nor rationale why certain practices need to be introduced in a specific maturity level. Comparison of the AMMs suggestions and the empirical study revealed that the guidance suggested by AMMs are not aligned with industry practice. The AMMs take a simplistic view of introducing Agile practices in a pre-determined order without consideration of the different contexts in industry. Our study indicates that practitioners iteratively add, remove, and modify the set of Agile practices they use to match their needs and contexts. In addition, the A

Context: Electroencephalograms (EEG) have been used in a few cases in the context of software engineering (SE). EEGs allow capturing emotions and cognitive functioning. Such human factors have already shown to be important to understand software engineering tasks. Therefore, it is essential to gain experience in the community to utilize EEG as a research tool. Objective: To report experiences of using EEG in the context of a software engineering education (review of master theses proposals). We provide our reflections and lessons learned of (1) how to plan an EEG study, (2) how to conduct and execute (e.g., tools), (3) how to analyze. Method: We carried out an experiment using an EEG headset to measure the participants’ attention rate. The experiment task includes reviewing three master thesis project plans. Results: We describe how we evolved our understanding of experimentation practices to collect and analyze psychological and cognitive data. We also provide a set of lessons learned regarding the application of EEG technology for research. Conclusions: We believe that that EEG could benefit software engineering research to collect cognitive information under certain conditions. The lessons learned reported here should be used as inputs for future experiments in software engineering, where human aspects are of interest. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.

To assess the benefits of introducing Agile practices, it is important to get a clear understanding of the baseline situation, i.e. the situation before their introduction. Without a clear baseline, we cannot properly assess the extent of impacts, both positive and negative, of introducing Agile practices. This paper provides a preliminary guideline to help researchers in capturing and reporting baseline situations. The guideline has been developed through the study of literature and interviews with industry practitioners, and validated by experts in academia.

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.

The growing interest in Agile and Lean software development is reflected in the increasing number of secondary studies on the benefits and limitations of Agile and Lean processes and practices. The aim of this tertiary study is to consolidate empirical evidence regarding Agile and Lean practices and their respective impacts on project constraints as defined in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK): scope, quality, schedule, budget, resources, communication, and risk. In this tertiary study, 13 secondary studies were included for detailed analysis. Given the heterogeneity of the data, we were unable to perform a rigorous synthesis. Instead, we mapped the identified Agile and Lean practices, and their impacts on the project constraints described in PMBOK. From 13 secondary studies, we identified 13 Agile and Lean practices. Test-Driven Development (TDD) is studied in ten secondary studies, meanwhile other practices are studied in only one or two secondary studies. This tertiary study provides a consolidated view of the impacts of Agile and Lean practices. The result of this tertiary study indicates that TDD has a positive impact on external quality. However, due to insufficient data or contradictory results, we were unable to make inferences on other Agile and Lean practices. Implications for research and practice are further discussed in the paper. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Currently managing requirement interdependencies using Agile practices is relatively unexplored. This study explores the state of practice of managing requirements interdependencies in Agile software development through a survey. A total of 52 complete responses were obtained, with 50% of the respondents suggesting that they consider requirements interdependencies. The preliminary result indicates that requirements interdependencies become a greater concern as the project and product complexity increases., Conference of REFSQ-2016 Workshops, co-located with the 22nd International Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality, REFSQ 2016 ; Conference Date: 14 March 2016; Conference Code:119952

Flexibility is important for software organizations to cope with changes demanded in the business environment. So far, flexibility has been extensively studied from a software product and software development process point of view. However, there is little work on how to build flexibility at the level of the whole software organization. Thus, there is no clear understanding of how to effectively improve the ability of an organization to respond to changes in a timely fashion and with little effort. This paper presents the results of a grounded theory study on how flexibility is built and improved in an IT organization and provides a holistic and explanatory view of how this is achieved. Implications for research and practices are also provided.

IT organizations need to react to changes in the business, the domain (e.g., regulatory issues), and the technological development. While some of these changes can be handled by adopting agile practices, others might have large, irreversible effects on the organization as a whole. While flexibility and agility have found their way into software project methodologies, IT organizations struggle with their adaptation at organizational level. This paper presents preliminary results of a grounded-theory study aimed at understanding how experienced managers handle flexibility. The results are a rich empirical source for improving flexibility of an IT organization at the strategic level and also a good starting point for further research towards generalizing agile ideas beyond software projects.

In this research we conducted a systematic reviewon Global Software Development (GSD) literature andperformed a survey to gather challenges associated with GSD projects as well as their mitigation strategies. We reviewedstudies with empirical evidence in GSD. In total there are 86papers included as the primary studies. From the systematicreview we collected 48 challenges and 42 mitigation strategies. These challenges and strategies were also identified by our survey respondents. In addition, 4 additional mitigation strategies were uncovered from the survey. The collected challenges and mitigation strategies are later compiled into checklists which can be employed as risk identification and risk mitigation instruments.

Context: Agile maturity models (AMMs) have been proposed to provide guidance for adopting Agile practices. Evaluations of AMMs indicatethat they might not be suitable for industry use. One issue is that AMMs have mainly been evaluated against pre-defined sets of criteria, instead of industry practice. Objectives: The objectives of this study are to: (1) compare current AMMs regarding their guidance for Agile adoption, (2) investigate the strategies for Agile adoption used by practitioners, and (3) investigate similarities and differences between (1) and (2). Methods: We conducted a literature survey that included grey literature to identify strategies proposed by the AMMs. We also conducted a survey and 11 interviews to identify the strategies used by practitioners to introduce Agile practices. This study combines quantitative and qualitative analysis. Results: From the literature survey we found 26 AMMs, whereof 12 provide explicit mappings of Agile practices to maturity levels. These mappings showed little agreement in when practices should be introduced. Based on 40 survey responses we identified three high-level strategies for introducing Agile practices: big-bang, incremental, and complex strategies. The survey andinterviews revealed that the guidance suggested by AMMs are not aligned well with industry practice and that Agile practices might already be in place before an organization starts a transition to Agile. Conclusion: In their current form, AMMs do not provide sufficient information to guide Agile adoption in industry. Our results suggest that there might be no universal strategy for Agile adoption that works better than others.