Agile and Lean: Organizations, Products and Development

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/107569

Browse

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Understanding the Difference between Office Presence and Co-presence in Team Member Interactions
(2024-01-03) Moe, Nils Brede; Ulsaker , Simen; Hildrum, Jarle Moss; Smite, Darja; Ay , Fehime Ceren
Although the public health emergency related to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has officially ended, many software developers still work partly from home. Agile teams that coordinate their office time foster a sense of unity, collaboration, and cohesion among team members. In contrast, teams with limited co-presence may experience challenges in establishing psychological safety and developing a cohesive and inclusive team culture, potentially hindering effective communication, knowledge sharing, and trust building. Therefore, the effect of agile team members not being co-located daily must be investigated. We explore the co-presence patterns of 17 agile teams in a large agile telecommunications company whose employees work partly from home. Based on office access card data, we found significant variation in co-presence practices. Some teams exhibited a coordinated approach, ensuring team members are simultaneously present at the office. However, other teams demonstrated fragmented co-presence, with only small subgroups of members meeting in person and the remainder rarely interacting with their team members face-to-face. Thus, high average office presence in the team does not necessarily imply that team members meet often in person at the office. In contrast, non-coordinated teams may have both high average office presence and low frequency of in-person interactions among the members. Our results suggest that the promotion of mere office presence without coordinated co-presence is based on a false assumption that good average attendance levels guarantee frequent personal interactions. These findings carry important implications for research on long-term team dynamics and practice.
Unveiling Challenges and Opportunities in Low Code Development Platforms: A StackOverflow Analysis
(2024-01-03) Elshan, Edona; Siemon, Dominik; Bruhin, Olivia; Kedziora, Damian; Schmidt, Niklas
As the rapidly expanding digital transformations at multiple organizations require development of growing number of software solutions, low code development platforms (LCDPs) started to be widely used by pretrained business users, in such use-cases as process automation and rapid application development. Our study explores the challenges of LCDPs use for developers, by investigating 30 000 of their posts at one of the most prominent fora StackOverflow. It is conducted with text-mining approaches, primarily Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), aiming to identify challenges for users of LCDPs. As they were from the areas of visualization, third-party integration, database and table management, datatype conversion, programming languages, and file handling, we further discussed them to propose possible enhancements for users of LCDPs.
Assessing Team Security Maturity in Large-Scale Agile Development
(2024-01-03) Nägele, Sascha; Watzelt, Jan-Philipp; Matthes, Florian
Organizations struggle to balance agile team autonomy and strict security governance in large-scale agile development environments. In particular, conventional top-down IT governance mechanisms often conflict with the desired autonomy of decentralized agile teams. Our research presents a novel approach to resolve the tension between security governance and development agility: a criteria-based security maturity assessment that enables greater autonomy for mature agile teams. Leveraging design science research, a literature review, and an interview study, we introduce two key contributions: a criteria catalog for evaluating a team's capabilities and a team security maturity model. Our expert evaluation confirms their value for systematically assessing the teams' capabilities to deliver secure and compliant applications, allowing organizations to grant more autonomy to mature teams and prioritize supporting lower-maturity teams. Future work could go beyond expert interviews and implement and evaluate the team security maturity model through a case study or experiments.
Exploring the Organizational Models for Data Science in Agile Software Development: Challenges and Strategies from a Multi-Case Study
(2024-01-03) Ulfsnes, Rasmus; Berntzen, Marthe; Moe, Nils Brede; Barbala, Astri; Sporsem, Tor; Stray, Viktoria
In an increasingly fast-paced and dynamic world with exponentially more data, more roles are required in agile software development. At the same time, the development team needs to maintain speed and autonomy. The challenges surrounding the organization of cross-functional teams are thus exacerbated. Through a multi-case study with interviews from five organizations, we show how agile companies use different models of organizing data scientists. We find that there are specific challenges related to each of these organizational models and that some challenges are shared among all the organizational models. Challenges include difficulty coordinating development strategies and a lack of resources. In addition, we identify strategies used to overcome the challenges, including coordinating mechanisms for platform teams, communities of practice for data scientists, and the development of shared playbooks.
An Empirical Study of Social Debt in Open-Source Projects: Social Drivers and the “Known Devil” Community Smell
(2024-01-03) Chen, Hong-Mei; Kazman, Rick; Catolino, Gemma; Manca, Massimo; Tamburri, Damian Andrew; Van Den Heuvel, Willem-Jan
Social debt, the accumulation of unforeseen project costs from suboptimal human-centered software development processes, is an important dimension of technical debt that cannot be ignored. Recent research on social debt focusing on the detection of specific social debt indicators, called community smells, has largely been conceptual and few of them are operationalizable. In addition, the studies on the causes of community smells also focused on group process instead of individual tendencies. In this paper we define and investigate four social drivers which are factors that influence individual developer choices in their collaboration in 13 open-source projects over four years: 1) inertia, 2) co-authorship (by chance or by choice), 3) experience heterophily, and 4) organization homophily. Building on previous studies and theories from sociology and psychology, we hypothesize how these drivers influence software quality outcomes. Our network analysis results include a contradiction to existing studies about experience heterophily and reveal a new community smell, which we call “Known Devil”, that can be automatically detected.
Introduction to the Minitrack on Agile and Lean: Organizations, Products and Development
(2024-01-03) Saltz, Jeffrey; Stray, Viktoria; Anderson, Edward; Sutherland, Alex

Browse

Recent Submissions