Management of quality requirements in agile and rapid software development: A systematic mapping study
Woubshet Behutiye, Pertti Karhapää, Lidia Lopez, Xavier Burgues, Silverio Martinez-Fernandez, Anna Maria Vollmer, Pilar Rodriiguez, Xavier Franch, Markku Oivo
Context:Quality requirements (QRs) describe the desired quality of software, and they play an important role in the success of software projects. In agile software development (ASD), QRs are often ill-defined and not well addressed due to the focus on quickly delivering functionality. Rapid software development (RSD) approaches (e.g., continuous delivery and continuous deployment), which shorten delivery times, are more prone to neglect QRs. Despite the significance of QRs in both ASD and RSD, there is limited synthesized knowledge on their management in those approaches. Objective:This study aims to synthesize state-of-the-art knowledge about QR management in ASD and RSD, focusing on three aspects: bibliometric, strategies, and challenges. Research method:Using a systematic mapping study with a snowballing search strategy, we identified and structured the literature on QR management in ASD and RSD. Check the PDF file to see the full abstract and document.
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?
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…
To satisfy the need for analytical data in the development of digital services, many organizations use data warehouse, and, more recently, data lake architectures. These architectures have traditionally been accompanied by centralized organizational models, where a single team or department has been responsible for gathering, transforming, and giving access to analytical data. However, such centralized models presuppose stability and are incompatible with agile software development where applications and databases are continuously updated. To achieve more agile forms of data management, some o…
After introducing agile approach in 2001, several agile methods were founded over the last decade. Agile values such as customer collaboration, embracing changes, iteration and frequent delivery, continuous integration, etc. motivate all software stakeholders to use these methods in their projects. The main issue is that for using these methods instead of traditional methods in software development, companies should change their approach from traditional to agile. This change is a fundamental and critical mutation. Several studies have been done for investigating of barriers, challenges and is…
Companies implement different frameworks and best practices with the objective to improve the project management success rate and improve the business adaptability to the changing business environment. Project management framework (PRINCE2) and agile development framework (Scrum) proved in many cases that they can meet these objectives. However, both frameworks are based on different principles and the use of both frameworks together should be carefully considered. A large amount of money and effort has been invested by companies into establishing their project management environment and proce…
While organizations want to develop software products with reduced cost and flexible scope, stories about the applicability of agile practices to improve project development and performance in the software industry are scarce and focused on specific methodologies such as Scrum and XP. Given these facts, this paper aims to investigate, through practitioners' perceptions of value, which agile practices are being used to improve two performance criteria for software projects-cost and scope. Using a multivariate statistical technique known as Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), the results suggest …
There is a lack of formal risk management techniques in agile software development methods Scrum. The need to manage risks in agile project management is also identified by various authors. Authors of this paper conducted a survey to find out the current practices in agile project management. Furthermore authors discuss the new integrated framework of Scrum and PRINCE2 with focus on risk management. Enrichment of Scrum with selected practices from the heavy-weight project management framework PRINCE2 promises better results in delivering software products especially in global development proje…
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…
We describe advice derived from one of the largest development programs in Norway, where twelve Scrum teams combined agile practices with traditional project management. The Perform program delivered 12 releases over a four-year period, and finished on budget and on time. In this article, we summarize 12 key lessons on five crucial topics, relevant to other large development projects seeking to combine Scrum with traditional project management.
Through our four years experiments on students' Scrum based agile software development (ASD) process, we have gained deep understanding into the human factors of agile methodology. We designed an agile project management tool - the HASE collaboration development platform to support more than 400 students self-organized into 80 teams to practice ASD. In this thesis, Based on our experiments, simulations and analysis, we contributed a series of solutions and insights in this researches, including 1) a Goal Net based method to enhance goal and requirement management for ASD process, 2) a novel Si…
Effective leadership is one of the key drivers of business and project success, and one of the most active areas of management research. But how does leadership work in agile software development, which emphasizes self-management and self-organization and marginalizes traditional leadership roles? To find out, this study examines agile leadership from the perspective of thirteen professionals who identify as agile leaders, in different roles, at ten different software development companies of varying sizes. Data from semi-structured interviews reveals that leadership: (1) is dynamically shared…
Release management is one of the most important software processes and is a set of processes that includes the compilation, configuration, and management of software versions in different environments. In recent years, changes in processes, technologies, and tools and changes in practices and understanding have paved the way for more effective, efficient, sustainable, reusable models and methods in this field. The purpose of this study is to examine the DevOps idea to produce a flow, highlight their benefits, and investigate with a model how these philosophies, which are two of the most import…
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 software development is nowadays a widely adopted practise in both open-source and industrial software projects. Agile teams typically heavily rely on issue management tools to document new issues and keep track of outstanding ones, in addition to storing their technical details, effort estimates, assignment to developers, and more. Previous work utilised the historical information stored in issue management systems for various purposes; however, when researchers make their empirical data public, it is usually relevant solely to the study's objective. In this paper, we present a more hol…
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…
University of Wollongong（伍伦贡大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Kyushu University（九州大学）
The rise of Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to significantly transform the practice of project management. Project management has a large socio-technical element with many uncertainties arising from variability in human aspects e.g., customers' needs, developers' performance and team dynamics. AI can assist project managers and team members by automating repetitive, high-volume tasks to enable project analytics for estimation and risk prediction, providing actionable recommendations, and even making decisions. AI is potentially a game changer for project management in helping to…
Time is one of the most important factors dominating agile software development processes in distributed settings. Effective time management helps agile teams to plan and monitor the work to be performed, and create and maintain a fast yet sustainable pace. The Pomodoro Technique is one promising time management technique. Its application and adaptation in Sourcesense Milan Team surfaced various benefits, challenges and implications for distributed agile software development. Lessons learnt from the experiences of Sourcesense Milan Team can be useful for other distributed agile teams to turn t…
Although agile software development methods have caught the attention of software engineers and researchers worldwide, scientific research still remains quite scarce. The aim of this study is to order and make sense of the different agile approaches that have been proposed. This comparative review is performed from the standpoint of using the following features as the analytical perspectives: project management support, life-cycle coverage, type of practical guidance, adaptability in actual use, type of research objectives and existence of empirical evidence. The results show that agile softwa…
Science has a data management problem, as well as a project management problem. While industrial-grade data science teams have embraced the agile mindset, and adopted or created all kind of tools to create reproducible workflows, academia-based science is still (mostly) mired in a mindset that is focused on a single final product (a paper), without focusing on incremental improvement, on any specific problem or customer, or, paying any attention reproducibility. In this report we argue towards the adoption of the agile mindset and agile data science tools in academia, to make a more responsibl…
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…
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…
Agile development methods are commonly used to iteratively develop the information systems and they can easily handle ever-changing business requirements. Scrum is one of the most popular agile software development frameworks. The popularity is caused by the simplified process framework and its focus on teamwork. The objective of Scrum is to deliver working software and demonstrate it to the customer faster and more frequent during the software development project. However the security requirements for the developing information systems have often a low priority. This requirements prioritizati…
T-Reqs is a text-based requirements management solution based on the git version control system. It combines useful conventions, templates and helper scripts with powerful existing solutions from the git ecosystem and provides a working solution to address some known requirements engineering challenges in large-scale agile system development. Specifically, it allows agile cross-functional teams to be aware of requirements at system level and enables them to efficiently propose updates to those requirements. Based on our experience with T-Reqs, we i) relate known requirements challenges of larg…
Context: Quality requirements (QRs) have a significant role in the success of software projects. In agile software development (ASD), where working software is valued over comprehensive documentation, QRs are often under-specified or not documented. Consequently, they may be handled improperly and result in degraded software quality and increased maintenance costs. Investigating the documentation of QRs in ASD, would provide evidence on existing practices, tools and aspects considered in ASD that other practitioners might utilize to improve documentation and management of QRs in ASD. Although …
Agile Management for Machine Learning: A Systematic Mapping Study
ExACTa Software Engineering Laboratory, Department of Informatics Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)（圣保罗大学里约热内卢分校信息学院ExACTa软件工程实验室）；fortiss GmbH（fortiss公司）
Software development projects management is a complex endeavor because it requires dealing with numerous unforeseen events that constantly arise along the way and that go against the expectations that had been established at the beginning. A good project leader is not so much who carries out what is planned, but rather who is able to deal with all the inconveniences that arise and, in the end, achieve a result that is as close as possible to what was expected [1]. In other words, what is most valued is the ability to adapt to changes, to face unforeseen events, to make the best decisions regar…
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…
Nowadays, application of Service Oriented Architecture is increasing rapidly; especially since introduction of distributed electronic services on the web. SOA software has a modular manner and works as a collaboration of independent software components. As a result, e-service approach is sufficient for software with independent components, each of which may be developed by a different company. Such software components and their cooperation form a composite service. Agile methodologies are the best candidate for developing small software components. Composite services and its building blocks ar…
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…
Agile development is conventional these days and with the passage of time software developers are rapidly moving from Waterfall to Agile development. Agile methods focus on delivering executable code quickly by increasing the responsiveness of software companies while decreasing development overhead and consider people as the strongest pillar of software development. As agile development overshadows Waterfall methodologies for software development, it comes up with some distinct challenges related to testing of such software. Our study is going to discuss the challenges this approach has stirr…
Nowadays, many individuals and teams involved on projects are already using agile development techniques as part of their daily work. However, we have much less experience in how to scale and manage agile practices in distributed software development. Distributed and global development- that requiring attention to many technical, organizational, and cultural issues as the teams interact to cooperatively delivery the solution. Alongside, very large team sizes, teams of teams, and more complex management structures forcing additional attention to coordination and management. At this level, there…
Today-s business environment is very much dynamic, and organisations are constantly changing their software requirements to adjust with new environment. They also demand for fast delivery of software products as well as for accepting changing requirements. In this aspect, traditional plan-driven developments fail to meet up these requirements. Though traditional software development methodologies, such as life cycle-based structured and object oriented approaches, continue to dominate the systems development few decades and much research has done in traditional methodologies, Agile software de…
Agile methods have transformed the way software is developed, emphasizing active end-user involvement, tolerance to change, and evolutionary delivery of products. The first special issue on agile development described the methods as focusing on "feedback and change". These methods have led to major changes in how software is developed. Scrum is now the most common framework for development in most countries, and other methods like extreme programming (XP) and elements of lean software development and Kanban are widely used. What started as a bottom-up movement amongst software practitioners an…
Agile Software Development (ASD) methodology has become widely used in the industry. Understanding the challenges facing software engineering students is important to designing effective training methods to equip students with proper skills required for effectively using the ASD techniques. Existing empirical research mostly focused on eXtreme Programming (XP) based ASD methodologies. There is a lack of empirical studies about Scrum-based ASD programming which has become the most popular agile methodology among industry practitioners. In this paper, we present empirical findings regarding the …
In collaborative agile ontology development projects support for modular reuse of ontologies from large existing remote repositories, ontology project life cycle management, and transitive dependency management are important needs. The Apache Maven approach has proven its success in distributed collaborative Software Engineering by its widespread adoption. The contribution of this paper is a new design artifact called OntoMaven. OntoMaven adopts the Maven-based development methodology and adapts its concepts to knowledge engineering for Maven-based ontology development and management of ontolo…
Overcoming Challenges in Agile and DevOps Integration: A Qualitative Study
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）；University of Applied Sciences & Arts Hannover（汉诺威应用科学与艺术大学）
To improve the Information Technology (I.T.) graduate skill set, students need to be immersed in as realistic a software development environment as possible. In continuing our work on integrating Agile Methodology into the Capstone Program of our Bachelor of Science in I.T. (BSIT) degree program, this paper discusses the student challenges and difficulties during the software development project, and provides recommendations on improving the student overall learning process in such a program. We collected survey data from the whole population of 90 BSITstudents across four academic years about…
In this article, we give advice on transitioning to a more agile delivery model for large-scale agile development projects based on experience from the Parental Benefit Project of the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration. The project modernized a central part of the organizations IT portfolio and included up to ten development teams working in parallel. The project successfully changed from using a delivery model which combined traditional project management elements and agile methods to a more agile delivery model with autonomous teams and continuous deployment. This transition was com…
Background: Quality requirements (QRs) describe desired system qualities, playing an important role in the success of software projects. In the context of agile software development (ASD), where the main objective is the fast delivery of functionalities, QRs are often ill-defined and not well addressed during the development process. Software analytics tools help to control quality though the measurement of quality-related software aspects to support decision-makers in the process of QR management. Aim: The goal of this research is to explore the benefits of integrating a concrete software ana…
