Agile and Lean: Organizations, Products and Development
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ItemThe Role of Work Engagement in Agile Software Development: Investigating Job Demands and Job Resources( 2019-01-08)Agile software development projects still show a high failure rate. Despite a growing amount of research, underlying reasons for project performance currently remain rare. Drawing on the job demands-resources theory, we propose a theoretical model of work engagement in agile software development teams. Using structural equation modeling, we found that agile practices diminish job demands (perceived workload and role ambiguity) and support job resources (perceived meaningfulness and job autonomy). Job resources have been found to be positively related to work engagement in agile software development teams. Our research contributes to the limited empirical understanding on work engagement in agile software development. For practitioners, our model provides tools to effectively manage team members’ work engagement.
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ItemSplicing Community and Software Architecture Smells in Agile Teams: An industrial Study( 2019-01-08)Software engineering nowadays largely relies on agile methods to carry out software development. In often highly distributed organizations, agile teams can develop organisational and socio-technical issues loosely defined as community smells, which reflect sub-optimal organisational configurations that bear additional project cost, a phenomenon called social debt. In this paper we look into the co-occurrence of such nasty organisational phenomena—community smells—with software architecture smells—indicators that software architectures may exhibit sub-optimal modularization structures, with consequent additional cost. We conclude that community smells can serve as a guide to steer the qualities of software architectures within agile teams.
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ItemAdapting (to) Agile Methods: Exploring the Interplay of Agile Methods and Organizational Features( 2019-01-08)It is a common understanding that agile methods are not implemented “one-to-one” from guidelines but are tailored to the specific conditions of organizations. This perspective, however, can be extended by taking into account that agile methods also have a considerable impact on organizational features of introducing firms. Against the backdrop of current application scenarios of agile methods in practice, this paper aims to capture and explain the interplay of agile methods and organizational features as well as their respective adaptations. By utilizing adaptive structuration theory as a theoretical research lens, I employ a qualitative-empirical research approach comprising four case studies. I find that the interplay of agile methods and organizational features represents a process of mutual adaptation that constitutes the organizational change in terms of agile methods’ implementation. I further conclude that agile methods represent a vehicle to foster desired organizational change.
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ItemImplementing the Planning Process within DevOps Teams to Achieve Continuous Innovation( 2019-01-08)Integrating business capabilities into software development projects is still a major challenge for organizations. New ways of working are appearing in response to react to novel market places. Hence, there are more and more business managers with good IT knowledge; thus, software developers need to understand business processes. Hence, the relationship between software development, operations, and business strategy needs to be enhanced. For collecting customer perspectives in IT projects, new approaches like DevOps and BizDevOps are being used. The customer view can be integrated within software development teams through the planning processes. Our findings show that continuous innovation mechanisms are connected with the planning of customer requirements. We present planning scalability, security, and quality as rich descriptions of continuous innovation. Furthermore, we present core categories of how the customer perspectives can be integrated within a DevOps team and insights on how planning areas influence the continuous innovation mechanisms.
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ItemDependency Management in Large-Scale Agile: A Case Study of DevOps Teams( 2019-01-08)Managing dependencies between teams and within teams is critical when running large-scale agile projects. In large-scale software development, work is carried out simultaneously by many developers and development teams. Results are delivered frequently and iteratively, which requires management of dependencies on both the project and team level. This study explores coordination mechanisms in agile DevOps teams in a large-scale project and how the mechanisms address different types of dependencies. We conducted a case study where we observed 38 scheduled meetings and interviewed members of five DevOps teams and two teams supporting the DevOps teams. By using a dependency taxonomy, we identified 20 coordination mechanisms (eleven synchronization activities and nine synchronization artifacts). Eight of these mechanisms seem essential for coordination in large-scale projects because they addressed more than four types of dependencies. The main implication is that project management needs to combine many practices handling all the dependencies in large-scale projects.
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ItemTeam Autonomy in Large-Scale Agile( 2019-01-08)Large-scale software development is increasingly making use of agile practices. In large-scale projects, a team needs to align with other teams and the rest of the organization. This has been shown to threaten team autonomy, which, in turn, reduces responsiveness and flexibility. Hence, agile teams face challenges in adapting to larger-scale development. We conduct a multiple case study of three large-scale projects to investigate barriers to team autonomy in large-scale agile. Two barriers are identified: overall direction and external dependencies. We found that goals are often set by management without involving the teams, that they are often equal to deliverables and deadlines, and that team members often do not know what the goals are. Consequently, teams struggle with setting and communicating goals as well as establishing a shared direction. Organizational dependencies lead to teams having to deal with additional tasks, resulting in specific members shielding the teams from external noise
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ItemDont Break the Build: Developing a Scrum Retrospective Game( 2019-01-08)This study discusses the design and observed play of a game-based Scrum retrospective. The game builds on the existing wealth of retrospective activities but adds in actual game play. The game is created in such a way as to satisfy the definition of a game and includes a win/loss state uncommon within typical retrospective activities. Leveraging existing design paradigms, the game looks to capitalize on the reported benefits of using games in team building and learning environments. The game fulfills the goals of a Scrum retrospective for the team to inspect and adapt processes by guiding the team in focused discussion regarding their performance and observations during the proceeding Sprint. The study provides an overview of the game design and mechanics and provides observations and results from post-game questionnaires. Finally, the study proposes changes to the game based on results of the observations and discusses future research possibilities.
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ItemProcess Efficiency - Adapting Flow to the Agile Improvement Effort( 2019-01-08)In Scrum, we measure performance using velocity. However, the velocity of one team cannot be compared to the velocity of another, since it is a relative measure that is only of meaning to the team using it. So can we objectively measure the performance of teams? Measuring Value Added Time as a percentage of Total Time is a metric that is used in Lean Manufacturing to help get a better understanding of production processes and optimize those processes. This paper introduces an adaptation of this metric to the Agile environment. Giving teams an objective insight into their efficiency helps them optimize their efficiency and compare themselves to other teams. This adapted metric is called Process Efficiency and is comparable across teams, technologies, and domains of practice.
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ItemAn Analysis of Measurement and Metrics Tools: A Systematic Literature Review( 2019-01-08)Measurement is an important field in Software Engineering, since it allows for organizations to obtain trustworthy estimates regarding deadlines, cost, and quality for the development of their software projects. Many tools are available for the calculation and storage of metrics and therefore, choosing the best tool can be a hard task. Faced with such a problem, this study carries out an analysis of the measurement tools presented in literature. The methodology chosen for the task was the systematic literature review. The results of the systematic review present the metric tools chosen in literature, their functionalities, and the main metrics used by these tools. The primary contribution of this article is a list with the metrics used by each of these tools, and their respective classification, according to their use in academia as well as in the software industry.
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ItemThe Usefulness of the Recommendations Regarding the Information System Development Method Selection during the Era of Digitalization( 2019-01-08)The business criticality of information systems (IS) and their development (ISD) appear to have increased recently. Backsourcing, cosourcing and multisourcing of ISD are some of the consequences. They, in turn, extend the need for understanding how to select information systems development methods (ISDM). In this research, we first condensed the knowledge base of ISDM selection research into nine recommendations. We then interviewed 28 ISDM experts and asked them to evaluate how useful the extant ISDM selection recommendations of prior research are to IS user organizations. We discovered that most recommendations were perceived outdated and only limitedly useful. We finally contemplated that paying more attention to how ISDMs are used in business development contexts is a means to increase the usefulness of ISDM selection recommendations.