XP customer practices: A grounded theory

The Customer is a critical role in XP, but almost all XP practices are presented for developers by developers. While XP calls for Real Customer Involvement, it does not explain what XP Customers should do, nor how they should do it. Using Grounded Theory, we discovered eight customer practices used by successful XP teams: Customer Boot Camp, Customer’s Apprentice, Customer Pairing, and Programmer’s Holiday support the well-being and effectiveness of customers; Programmer On-site and Road shows support team and organization interactions; and Big Picture Up Front and Re-calibration support Customers steering the whole project. By adopting these processes, XP Customers and teams can work faster and more sustainably

Agile, Web Engineering and Capability Maturity ModelI ntegration : A systematic literature review

Context Agile approaches are an alternative for organizations developing software, particularly for those who develop Web applications. Besides, CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) models are well-established approaches focused on assessing the maturity of an organization that develops software. Web Engineering is the field of Software Engineering responsible for analyzing and studying the specific characteristics of the Web. The suitability of an Agile approach to help organizations reach a certain CMMI maturity level in Web environments will be very interesting, as they will be able to keep the ability to quickly react and adapt to changes as long as their development processes get mature. Objective This paper responds to whether it is feasible or not, for an organization developing Web systems, to achieve a certain maturity level of the CMMI-DEV model using Agile methods. Method The proposal is analyzed by means of a systematic literature review of the relevant approaches in the field, defining a characterization schema in order to compare them to introduce the current state-of-the-art. Results The results achieved after the systematic literature review are presented, analyzed and compared against the defined schema, extracting relevant conclusions for the different dimensions of the problem: compatibility, compliance, experience, maturity and Web. Conclusion It is concluded that although the definition of an Agile approach to meet the different CMMI maturity levels goals could be possible for an organization developing Web systems, there is still a lack of detailed studies and analysis on the field

The XP customer team: A grounded theory

The initial definition of XP resulted in many people interpreting the on-site customer to be a single person. We have conducted extensive qualitative research studying XP teams, and one of our research questions was “who is the customer”? We found that, rather than a single person, a customer team always exists. In this paper we outline the different roles that were typically on the team, which range from the recognized “Acceptance Tester” role to the less recognized roles of “Political Advisor” and “Super-Secretary”

Empirical Investigation on Agile Methods Usage: Issues Identified from Early Adopters in Malaysia

Agile Methods are a set of software practices that can help to produce products faster and at the same time deliver what customers want. Despite the benefits that Agile methods can deliver, however, we found few studies from the Southeast Asia region, particularly Malaysia. As a result, less empirical evidence can be obtained in the country making its implementation harder. To use a new method, experience from other practitioners is critical, which describes what is important, what is possible and what is not possible concerning Agile. We conducted a qualitative study to understand the issues faced by early adopters in Malaysia where Agile methods are still relatively new. The initial study involves 13 participants including project managers, CEOs, founders and software developers from seven organisations. Our study has shown that social and human aspects are important when using Agile methods. While technical aspects have always been considered to exist in software development, we found these factors to be less important when using Agile methods. The results obtained can serve as guidelines to practitioners in the country and the neighbouring regions

Software development methods and usability: Perspectives from a survey in the software industry in Norway

This paper investigates the relationship between traditional software development methodologies and usability. The point of departure is the assumption that two important disciplines in software development, one of software development methods (SDMs) and one of usability work, are not integrated in industrial software projects. Building on previous research we investigate two questions; (1) Will software companies generally acknowledge the importance of usability, but not prioritise it in industrial projects? and (2) To what degree are software development methods and usability perceived by practitioners as being integrated? To this end a survey in the Norwegian IT industry was conducted. From a sample of 259 companies we received responses from 78 companies. In response to our first research question, our findings show that although there is a positive bias towards usability, the importance of usability testing is perceived to be much less than that of usability requirements. Given the strong time and cost pressures associated with the software industry, we believe that these results highlight that there is a gap between intention and reality. Regarding our second research question our survey revealed that companies perceive usability and software development methods to be integrated. This is in contrast to earlier research, which, somewhat pessimistically, has argued for the existence of two different cultures, one of software development and one of usability. The findings give hope for the future, in particular because the general use of system development methods are pragmatic and adaptable

Enterprise Agility: Why Is Transformation so Hard?

Enterprise agility requires capabilities to transform, sense and seize new business opportunities more quickly than competitors. However, acquiring those capabilities, such as continuous delivery and scaling agility to product programmes, portfolios and business models, is challenging in many organisations. This paper introduces definitions of enterprise agility involving business management and cultural lenses for analysing large-scale agile transformation. The case organisation, in the higher education domain, leverages collaborative discovery sprints and an experimental programme to enable a bottom-up approach to transformation. Meanwhile the prevalence of bureaucracy and organisational silos are often contradictory to agile principles and values. The case study results identify transformation challenges based on observations from a five-month research period. Initial findings indicate that increased focus on organisational culture and leveraging of both bottom-up innovation and supportive top-down leadership activities, could enhance the likelihood of a successful transformation

Catching up with Method and Process Practice: An Industry-Informed Baseline for Researchers

Software development methods are usually not applied by the book.companies are under pressure to continuously deploy software products that meet market needs and stakeholders\u27 requests. To implement efficient and effective development processes, companies utilize multiple frameworks, methods and practices, and combine these into hybrid methods. A common combination contains a rich management framework to organize and steer projects complemented with a number of smaller practices providing the development teams with tools to complete their tasks. In this paper, based on 732 data points collected through an international survey, we study the software development process use in practice. Our results show that 76.8% of the companies implement hybrid methods.company size as well as the strategy in devising and evolving hybrid methods affect the suitability of the chosen process to reach company or project goals. Our findings show that companies that combine planned improvement programs with process evolution can increase their process\u27 suitability by up to 5%

Identifying Agile Requirements Engineering Patterns in Industry

Agile Software Development (ASD) is gaining in popularity in today´s business world. Industry is adopting agile methodologies both to accelerate value delivery and to enhance the ability to deal with changing requirements. However, ASD has a great impact on how Requirements Engineering (RE) is carried out in agile environments. The integration of Human-Centered Design (HCD) plays an important role due to the focus on user and stakeholder involvement. To this end, we aim to introduce agile RE patterns as main objective of this paper. On the one hand, we will describe our pattern mining process based on empirical research in literature and industry. On the other hand, we will discuss our results and provide two examples of agile RE patterns. In sum, the pattern mining process identifies 41 agile RE patterns. The accumulated knowledge will be shared by means of a web application.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED