We analyse the time evolution of two open source Java projects: Eclipse and Netbeans, both developed following agile practices, though to a different extent. Our study is centered on quality analysis of the systems, measured as defects absence, and its relation with software metrics evolution. The two projects are described through a software graph in which nodes are represented by Java files and edges describe the existing relation between nodes. We propose a metrics suite for Java files based on Chidamber and Kemerer suite, and use it to study software evolution and its relationship with bug count.
Context: Companies adapt agile methods, practices or artifacts for their use in practice since more than two decades. This adaptions result in a wide variety of described agile practices. For instance, the Agile Alliance lists 75 different practices in its Agile Glossary. This situation may lead to misunderstandings, as agile practices with similar names can be interpreted and used differently. Objective: This paper synthesize an integrated list of agile practices, both from primary and secondary sources. Method: We performed a tertiary study to identify existing overviews and lists of agile p…
There is the widespread belief that Agile neglects the product quality. This lack of understanding how Agile processes assure the quality of the product prevents especially companies from regulated domains from an adoption of Agile. This work aims to identify which Agile Practices contribute towards product quality. Hence, data from a survey study is analyzed to identify Ag-ile Practices which are beneficial or harmful for the quality of the product. From 49 practices that were used in the survey so far, 36 were perceived to have a positive impact on product quality, while four practices were …
Agile processes explicitly focus more on team-work than more traditional management techniques when building software. With high velocity and responsiveness on team-level come the risk of interpersonal conflict in the agile organizations. Through a survey with 68 software developers from three large Swedish companies, I found that the presence of interpersonal conflict was negatively connected to the agile practices Iterative Development and Customer Access. The agile practices Iteration Planning and Iterative Development were positively linked to the measurement of the developers' perceived t…
Context: Existing knowledge in agile software development suggests that individual competency (e.g. skills) is a critical success factor for agile projects. While assuming that technical skills are important for every kind of software development project, many researchers suggest that non-technical individual skills are especially important in agile software development. Objective: In this paper, we investigate whether non-technical individual skills can predict the use of agile practices. Method: Through creating a set of multiple linear regression models using a total of 113 participants fro…
Quantum software systems are emerging software engineering (SE) genre that exploit principles of quantum bits (Qubit) and quantum gates (Qgates) to solve complex computing problems that today classic computers can not effectively do in a reasonable time. According to its proponents, agile software development practices have the potential to address many of the problems endemic to the development of quantum software. However, there is a dearth of evidence confirming if agile practices suit and can be adopted by software teams as they are in the context of quantum software development. To addres…
The perceptions and attitudes of developers impact how software projects are run and which development practices are employed in development teams. Recent agile methodologies have taken this into account, focusing on collaboration and shared team culture. In this research, we investigate the perceptions of agile development practices and their usage in Scrum software development teams. Although perceptions collected through surveys of 42 participating students did not evolve significantly over time, our analyses show that the Scrum role significantly impacted participants' views of employed de…
Smaller software companies, such as start-ups do not often follow an explicit process, but rather develop in a more or less unstructured way. Especially when they grow or customer involvement increases. This development without any structured process results in problems. Thus, our objective was the improvement of the current development process of one software start-up by introducing appropriate agile practices and eliciting their effects. For this reason, we per-formed a pre and post process assessment using interviews. Based on the initial assessment, agile practices were selected and implem…
Since the Agile Manifesto, many organizations have explored agile development methods to replace traditional waterfall development. Interestingly, waterfall remains the most widely used practice, suggesting that there is something missing from the many "flavors" of agile methodologies. We explore seven of the most common practices to explore this, and evaluate each against a series of criteria centered around product quality and adherence to agile practices. We find that no methodology entirely replaces waterfall and summarize the strengths and weaknesses of each. From this, we conclude that a…
With the agile approach to managing software development projects comes an increased dependability on well functioning teams, since many of the practices are built on teamwork. The objective of this study was to investigate if, and how, team development from a group psychological perspective is related to some work practices of agile teams. Data were collected from 34 agile teams (200 individuals) from six software development organizations and one university in both Brazil and Sweden using the Group Development Questionnaire (Scale IV) and the Perceptive Agile Measurement (PAM). The result in…
The purpose of this paper is to suggest additional aspects of social psychology that could help when making sense of autonomous agile teams. To make use of well-tested theories in social psychology and instead see how they replicated and differ in the autonomous agile team context would avoid reinventing the wheel. This was done, as an initial step, through looking at some very common agile practices and relate them to existing findings in social-psychological research. The two theories found that I argue could be more applied to the software engineering context are social identity theory and …
Linting tools automatically identify source code fragments that do not follow a set of predefined standards. Such feedback tools are equally desirable for "linting" agile development processes. However, providing concrete feedback on process conformance is a challenging task, due to the intentional lack of formal agile process models. In this paper, we present ScrumLint, a tool that tackles this issue by analyzing development artifacts. On the basis of experiences with an undergraduate agile software engineering course, we defined a collection of process metrics. These contain the core ideas o…
Requirements Engineering (RE) is one of the prime areas in software development. Since agile software development englobes several emerging techniques and advocates for continuous improvement, it urges the question of which agile RE practices are currently most used, their characteristics, and the challenges in their employment. The aim of this work is to investigate and categorize the collection and specification of agile requirements practices based on how professionals perceive their importance for a software project that applies agile methodologies. Thus, a survey was carried out with fort…
Requirements engineering (RE) is considerably different in agile development than in more traditional development processes. Yet, there is little empirical knowledge on the state of the practice and contemporary problems in agile RE. As part of a bigger survey initiative (Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering), we build an empirical basis on such aspects of agile RE. Based on the responses of representatives from 92 different organisations, we found that agile RE concentrates on free-text documentation of requirements elicited with a variety of techniques. Often, traces between requireme…
The Agile Manifesto describes that the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is through face-to-face conversation. However that is not always possible when teams are working in a Global Software Development (GSD) environment. Based on this scenario, this study presents an exploratory data analysis using survey results to explore agile practices and challenges of a global software development team that uses ScaledAgile Framework (SAFe), which is designed for the need of larger organizations. The goal of this study is to understand the team…
Agile practices are receiving considerable attention from industry as an alternative to traditional software development approaches. However, there are a number of challenges in combining Agile [2] with Test-driven development (TDD) [10] practices, cloud deployments, continuous integration (CI), non-stop performance, load, security and accessibly testing. From these challenges; Continuous Integration is a relatively an approach widely discussed and practiced in software testing. This paper describes an approach for improved Agile Methodology using Code Quality, Code Bisector and Dynamic Regres…
There is some ambiguity of what agile means in both research and practice. Authors have suggested a diversity of different definitions, through which it is difficult to interpret what agile really is. The concept, however, exists in its implementation through agile practices. In this vision paper, we argue that adopting an agile approach boils down to being more responsive to change. To support this claim, we relate agile principles, practices, the agile manifesto, and our own experiences to this core definition. We envision that agile transformations would be, and are, much easier using this …
Model driven development is an effective method due to its benefits such as code transformation, increasing productivity and reducing human based error possibilities. Meanwhile, agile software development increases the software flexibility and customer satisfaction by using iterative method. Can these two development approaches be combined to develop web applications efficiently? What are the challenges and what are the benefits of this approach? In this paper, we answer these two crucial problems; combining model driven development and agile software development results in not only fast devel…
Context: User-Centered Design and Agile methodologies focus on human issues. Nevertheless, agile methodologies focus on contact with contracting customers and generating value for them. Usually, the communication between end users and the agile team is mediated by customers. However, they do not know the problems end users face in their routines. Hence, UX issues are typically identified only after the implementation, during user testing and validation. Objective: Aiming to improve the understanding and definition of the problem in agile projects, this research investigates the practices and d…
Agile software development principles enable companies to successfully and quickly deliver software by meeting their customers' expectations while focusing on high quality. Many companies working with pure software systems have adopted these principles, but implementing them in companies dealing with non-pure software products is challenging. We identified a set of goals and practices to support large-scale agile development in companies that develop software-intense mechatronic systems. We used an inductive approach based on empirical data collected during a longitudinal study with six compan…
The 2nd Workshop on Agile Practice & Research: A Summary and Call For Research
BSP Business and Law School - Campus Hamburg（汉堡商业与法学院）；University of Applied Sciences & Arts Hannover（汉诺威应用科学与艺术学院）；University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer（埃姆登/莱尔应用科学大学）；Auckland University of Technology（奥克兰理工大学）；Federal University of São Paulo（圣保罗联邦大学）
The paper explains and clarifies the differences between Waterfall and Agile development methodologies, establishes what criteria could be taken into account to properly define project success within the scope of software development projects, and finally tries to clarify if project success is the reason why many organizations are moving to Agile methodologies from other ones such as Waterfall. In the form of a literature review, it analyses several, publications, investigations and case studies that point out the motives why companies moved to Agile, as well as the results they observed after…
How risks are managed implicitly and explicitly at multiple levels of agile projects has not been extensively studied and there is a need to investigate how risk management can be used in large agile projects. This is the objective of this exploratory study which investigates the following research question: How does a large software/hardware development project using agile practices manage uncertainty at project/subproject and work package levels?
Neurodiversity in Agile Teams: Obstacles and Inclusion Barriers
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover（汉诺威应用科学与艺术学院）；University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer（埃姆登/莱尔应用科学大学）；Bagilstein GmbH（巴吉尔斯坦有限公司）；IU International University（IU国际大学）；DB Systel GmbH（德铁系统有限公司）
Together with many success stories, promises such as the increase in production speed and the improvement in stakeholders' collaboration have contributed to making agile a transformation in the software industry in which many companies want to take part. However, driven either by a natural and expected evolution or by contextual factors that challenge the adoption of agile methods as prescribed by their creator(s), software processes in practice mutate into hybrids over time. Are these still agile? In this article, we investigate the question: what makes a software development method agile? We…
Context: Contemporary software development is typically conducted in dynamic, resource-scarce environments that are prone to the accumulation of technical debt. While this general phenomenon is acknowledged, what remains unknown is how technical debt specifically manifests in and affects software processes, and how the software development techniques employed accommodate or mitigate the presence of this debt. Objectives: We sought to draw on practitioner insights and experiences in order to classify the effects of agile method use on technical debt management. We explore the breadth of practit…
Agile processes focus on facilitating early and fast production of working code, and are based on software development process models that support iterative, incremental development of software. Although agile methods have existed for a number of years now, answers to questions concerning the suitability of agile processes to particular software development environments are still often based on anecdotal accounts of experiences. An appreciation of the (often unstated) assumptions underlying agile processes can lead to a better understanding of the applicability of agile processes to particular…
Agile processes are now widely practiced by software engineering (SE) teams, and the agile manifesto claims that agile methods support responding to changes well. However, no study appears to have researched whether this is accurate in reality. Requirements changes (RCs) are inevitable in any software development environment, and we wanted to acquire a holistic picture of how RCs occur and are handled in agile SE teams in practice. We also wanted to know whether responding to changes is the only or a main reason for software teams to use agile in their projects. To do this we conducted a mixed…
Papers on Agile Software Development methods are often focused on their applicability in commercial projects or organizations. There are no current studies that we know about addressing the application of these methods in research projects. The objective of this work is to describe the perception of researchers on the application of agile software development practices and principles for research projects. A study was conducted by constructing and applying a questionnaire to Brazilian researchers of different affiliations, formation and research areas in order to obtain information about their…
Integrating security into agile software development is an open issue for research and practice. Especially in strongly regulated industries, complexity increases not only when scaling agile practices but also when aiming for compliance with security standards. To achieve security compliance in a large-scale agile context, we developed S2C-SAFe: An extension of the Scaled Agile Framework that is compliant to the security standard IEC~62443-4-1 for secure product development. In this paper, we present the framework and its evaluation by agile and security experts within Siemens' large-scale pro…
Teaching agile software development by pairing lectures with hands-on projects has become the norm. This approach poses the problem of grading and evaluating practical project work as well as process conformance during development. Yet, few best practices exist for measuring the success of students in implementing agile practices. Most university courses rely on observations during the course or final oral exams. In this paper, we propose a set of metrics which give insights into the adherence to agile practices in teams. The metrics identify instances in development data, e.g. commits or user…
Between Policy and Practice: GenAI Adoption in Agile Software Development Teams
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover（汉诺威应用科学与艺术大学）；University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer（埃姆登/莱尔应用科学大学）；Bagilstein GmbH（巴吉尔斯坦有限公司）；IU International University（IU国际大学）；Volkswagen AG（大众汽车股份公司）
Background: Agile methods are no longer restricted to small projects and co-located teams. The last decade has seen the spread of agile into large scale, distributed and regulated domains. Many case studies show successful agile adoption in GSD, however, taken as a whole, it remains unclear how widespread this trend is, and what form the agile adoption takes in a global software development (GSD) setting. Aims: Our objective is to gain a deeper understanding of how organisations adopt agile development methods in distributed settings. Specifically we aim to plot the current development process…
Knowledge-intensive companies that adopt Agile Software Development (ASD) relay on efficient implementation of Knowledge Management (KM) strategies to promotes different Knowledge Processes (KPs) to gain competitive advantage. This study aims to explore how companies that adopt ASD implement KM strategies utilizing practices that promote the KPs in the different organizational layers. Through a systematic literature review, we analyzed 32 primary studies, selected by automated search and snowballing in the extant literature. To analyze the data, we applied narrative synthesis. Most of the iden…
Agile development gets more appreciation from the market due to the flexible nature and more productivity. Among the Agile processes, Scrum gives better management of the processes, which are practiced in an organization. Though Scrum process model have several features and strengths but it still lacks in management and quality. This research deals with the improvement of Scrum processes for better management and to improve the quality of the software using the infusion of different practices from internationally renowned quality standards. Survey is used to validate the proposed framework. St…
The objectives of this study was to bring out the understanding of the concept of agile IT project management; what it is and what it is not. It was also aimed at comparing the pros and cons of both agile and traditional methods of IT project management in a typical industry setting; the challenges of going purely agile, and so on. It is purely a review of literature of peer reviewed papers sourced mainly from Google Scholar. It was revealed that agile outweigh the traditional methods in terms of benefits, but its implementation poses a lot of challenges due to a number of issues, paramount am…
Agile methods have gotten a good reputation for managing projects in many different sectors. A challenge among practitioners in the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) domain, is to decide if an agile method is suitable or not for new projects. This study investigates how decision-makers select between agile and plan-driven ERP implementation projects in relation to known factors from previous research. We selected projects that the decision-makers assessed as successful, but borderline, agile and plan-driven projects already implemented and let project managers fill out a survey consisting of …
Software development has steadily embraced agile software development methodology/method (ASDM) and has been moving away from the plan driven software development methodology (PDM) approaches like waterfall. Given the iterative nature of agile development, the integration of software architecture into the agile way has become challenging. This research identifies the challenges of having a robust architecture in projects already executed by plan driven methods and new projects likewise by conducting a literature review and a case study analysis. The ensuing analysis finds that there are three …
