Many tools have been created for measuring the agility of software teams, thus creating a saturation in the field. Three agile measurement tools were selected in order to validate whether they yield sim-ilar results. The surveys of the tools were given to teams in Company A (N = 30). The questions were grouped into agile practices which were checked for correlation in order to establish convergent validity. In addition, we checked whether the questions identified to be the same among the tools would be given the same replies by the respondents. We could not establish convergent validity since the correlations of the data gathered were very few and low. In addition, the questions which were identified to have the same meaning among the tools did not have the same answers from the respondents. We conclude that the area of measuring agility is still immature and more work needs to be done. Not all tools are applicable to every team but they should be selected on the basis of how a team has transitioned to agile.
Agility Assessment (AA) comprises tools, assessment techniques, and frameworks that focus on indicating how a company or a team is applying agile techniques and eventually pointing out problems in adopting agile practices at a project-level, organization-level or individual-level. There are many approaches for AA such as agility assessment models, agility checklists, agility surveys, and agility assessment tools. This report presents the state of the art approaches that support agility assessment.
Agility implies a set of principles that need to be followed in order to have the proposed responsiveness to change. This paper presents how the Agile Adoption Framework can be used to assess agility and pinpoint focus areas for companies that want to improve. Management found it useful in general to get data on possible focus points for improvement in their agile transformation. We believe the suggested tool could be useful as one step in the agile process assessment.
An agile change effort in an organization needs to be understood in relation to human processes. Such theory and accompanying tools already existed almost 50 years ago in applied psychology. The core ideas of Agile Process Consultation are that a client initiating a change toward more agility often does not know what is wrong and the consultant needs to diagnose the problem jointly with the client. It is also assumed that the agile consultant cannot know the organizational culture of the client's organization, which means that the client needs to be making the decisions based on the suggestion…
Sustainability is a promise by agile development, as it is part of both the Agile Alliance's and the Scrum Alliance's vision. Thus far, not much has been delivered on this promise. This paper explores the Agile Manifesto and points out how agility could contribute to sustainability in its three dimensions - social, economic, and environmental. Additionally, this paper provides some sample cases of companies focusing on both sustainability (partially or holistically) and agile development.
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 …
The focus on psychology has increased within software engineering due to the project management innovation "agile development processes". The agile methods do not explicitly consider group development aspects; they simply assume what is described in group psychology as mature groups. This study was conducted with 45 employees and their twelve managers (N=57) from two SAP customers in the US that were working with agile methods, and the data were collected via an online survey. The selected Agility measurement was correlated to a Group Development measurement and showed significant convergent v…
Agile development has now become a well-known approach to collaboration in professional work life. Both researchers and practitioners want validated tools to measure agility. This study sets out to validate an agile maturity measurement model with statistical tests and empirical data. First, a pretest was conducted as a case study including a survey and focus group. Second, the main study was conducted with 45 employees from two SAP customers in the US. We used internal consistency (by a Cronbach's alpha) as the main measure for reliability and analyzed construct validity by exploratory princi…
Facing an environment increasingly complex, uncertain and changing, even in crisis, organizations are driven to be agile in order to survive. Agility, at the core heart of business strategy, represents the ability to grow in a competitive environment of continuous and unpredictable changes with information systems perceived as one of its main enablers. In other words, to be agile, organizations must be able to rely on agile enterprise information systems/information technology (IT/IS). Since, the agility needs are not the same among stakeholders, the objective of this research is to develop a …
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…
Large development projects and programs are conducted using agile development methods, with an increasing body of advice from practitioners and from research. This sixth workshop showed in increasing interest in scaling frameworks and in topics related to achieving business agility. This article summarizes four contributed papers, discussions in "open space" format and also presents a revised research agenda for large-scale agile development.
[Context]Advancement in technologies, popularity of small-batch manufacturing and the recent trend of investing in hardware startups are among the factors leading to the rise of hardware startups nowadays. It is essential for hardware startups to be not only agile to develop their business but also efficient to develop the right products. [Objective] We investigate how hardware startups achieve agility when developing their products in early stages. [Methods] A qualitative research is conducted with data from 20 hardware startups. [Result] Preliminary results show that agile development is kno…
The agile approach to projects focuses more on close-knit teams than traditional waterfall projects, which means that aspects of group maturity become even more important. This psychological aspect is not much researched in connection to the building of an "agile team." The purpose of this study is to investigate how building agile teams is connected to a group development model taken from social psychology. We conducted ten semi-structured interviews with coaches, Scrum Masters, and managers responsible for the agile process from seven different companies, and collected survey data from 66 gr…
There has been some evidence that agility is connected to the group maturity of software development teams. This study aims at conducting group development psychology training with student teams, participating in a project course at university, and compare their group effectiveness score to their agility usage over time in a longitudinal design. Seven XP student teams were measured twice (43+40), which means 83 data points divided into two groups (an experimental group and one control group). The results showed that the agility measurement was not possible to increase by giving a 1.5-hour of g…
For Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) to become Agile, it is has to be usable with and for DevOps as the technical basis of Agility. We describe our experiences in implementing and applying the BB8 architecture that provides a means to reuse Eclipse-based MDE toolkits within an integrating workflow system. We describe the use of the architecture with in the Gitlab DevOps system and discuss future research fields that emerge as the result of our implementation.
Scholars have tried to explain how organizations can build agile teams by only looking at one level of analysis. We argue in this short paper that lessons can be learned from organizational science results explaining variance on three different abstraction levels of organizations. We suggest agility needs to be explained from organizational (macro), the team (meso), and individual (micro) levels to provide useful and actionable guidelines to practitioners. We are currently designing such studies and hope that they will eventually result in validated measurements that can be used to prevent com…
Agile methods are receiving a growing interest from industry and these approaches are nowadays well accepted and deployed in software engineering. However, some issues remain to introduce agility in systems engineering. The objective of this paper is to show an agile management implementation in an educational project consisting in developing a connected mobile robot, and to evaluate the issues and benefits of adopting an agile approach. Among the most famous agile management methods, SCRUM has been chosen to lead this experiment. This paper first presents the project and how students traditio…
Research has shown that the maturity of small workgroups from a psychological perspective is intimately connected to team agility. We, therefore, tested if agile team members appreciated group development psychology training. Our results show that the participating teams seem to have a very positive view of group development training and state that they now have a new way of thinking about teamwork and new tools to deal with team-related problems. We, therefore, see huge potential in training agile teams in group development psychology since the positive effects might span over the entire soft…
Industry in all sectors is experiencing a profound digital transformation that puts software at the core of their businesses. In order to react to continuously changing user requirements and dynamic markets, companies need to build robust workflows that allow them to increase their agility in order to remain competitive. This increasingly rapid transformation, especially in domains like IoT or Cloud computing, poses significant challenges to guarantee high quality software, since dynamism and agile short-term planning reduce the ability to detect and manage risks. In this paper, we describe th…
In dynamic and turbulent business environment, the need for success and survival of any organization is the ability of adapting to changes efficiently and cost-effectively. So, for developing software applications, one of the methods is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methodology and other is Agile Methodology. Since embracing changes is the indispensable concept of SOA development as well as Agile Development, using an appropriate SOA methodology able to adapt changes even during system development with the preservation of software quality is necessary. In this paper, a new approach consi…
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…
In order to increase the ability to build complex, software-intensive systems, as well as to decrease time-to-market for new functionality, automotive companies aim to scale agile methods beyond individual teams. This is challenging, given the specifics of automotive systems that are often safety-critical and consist of software, hardware, and mechanical components. This paper investigates the concrete reasons for scaling agility beyond teams, the strategies that support such scaling, and foreseeable implications that such a drastic organizational change will entail. The investigation is based…
Agile approaches tend to focus solely on scoping and simplicity rather than on problem solving and discovery. This hampers the development of innovative solutions. Additionally, little has been said about how to capture and represent the real user needs. To fill this gap, some authors argue in favor of the application of Creative thinking for requirements elicitation within agile software development. This synergy between creativeness and agility has arisen as a new means of bringing innovation and flexibility to increasingly demanding software. The aim of the present study is therefore to emp…
Hackathons are events in which diverse teams work together to explore, and develop solutions, software or even ideas. Hackathons have been recognized not only as public events for hacking, but also as a corporate mechanism for innovation. Hackathons are a way for established companies to achieve increased employee wellbeing as well as being a curator for innovation and developing new products. Sudden transition to the work-from-home mode caused by the COVID-19 pandemic first put many corporate events requiring collocation, such as hackathons, temporarily on hold and then motivated companies to…
