Estimating, planning and managing Agile Web development projects under a value-based perspective

Context: The processes of estimating, planning and managing are crucial for software development projects, since the results must be related to several business strategies. The broad expansion of the Internet and the global and interconnected economy make Web development projects be often characterized by expressions like delivering as soon as possible, reducing time to market and adapting to undefined requirements. In this kind of environment, traditional methodologies based on predictive techniques sometimes do not offer very satisfactory results. The rise of Agile methodologies and practices has provided some useful tools that, combined with Web Engineering techniques, can help to establish a framework to estimate, manage and plan Web development projects. Objective: This paper presents a proposal for estimating, planning and managing Web projects, by combining some existing Agile techniques with Web Engineering principles, presenting them as an unified framework which uses the business value to guide the delivery of features. Method: The proposal is analyzed by means of a case study, including a real-life project, in order to obtain relevant conclusions. Results: The results achieved after using the framework in a development project are presented, including interesting results on project planning and estimation, as well as on team productivity throughout the project. Conclusion: It is concluded that the framework can be useful in order to better manage Web-based projects, through a continuous value-based estimation and management process.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-

Business Value Is not only Dollars - Results from Case Study Research on Agile Software Projects

Business value is a key concept in agile software development. This paper presents results of a case study on how business value and its creation is perceived in the context of agile projects. Our overall conclusion is that the project participants almost never use an explicit and structured approach to guide the value creation throughout the project. Still, the application of agile methods in the studied cases leads to satisfied clients. An interesting result of the study represents the fact that the agile process of many projects differs significantly from what is described in the agile practitioners’ books as best practices. The key implication for research and practice is that we have an incentive to pursue the study of value creation in agile projects and to complement it by providing guidelines for better client’s involvement, as well as by developing structured methods that will enhance the value-creation in a project

An Update on Effort Estimation in Agile Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

[EN] Software developers require effective effort estimation models to facilitate project planning. Although Usman et al. systematically reviewed and synthesized the effort estimation models and practices for Agile Software Development (ASD) in 2014, new evidence may provide new perspectives for researchers and practitioners. This article presents a systematic literature review that updates the Usman et al. study from 2014 to 2020 by analyzing the data extracted from 73 new papers. This analysis allowed us to identify six agile methods: Scrum, Xtreme Programming and four others, in all of which expert-based estimation methods continue to play an important role. This is particularly the case of Planning Poker, which is very closely related to the most frequently used size metric (story points) and the way in which software requirements are specified in ASD. There is also a remarkable trend toward studying techniques based on the intensive use of data. In this respect, although most of the data originate from single-company datasets, there is a significant increase in the use of cross-company data. With regard to cost factors, we applied the thematic analysis method. The use of team and project factors appears to be more frequent than the consideration of more technical factors, in accordance with agile principles. Finally, although accuracy is still a challenge, we identified that improvements have been made. On the one hand, an increasing number of papers showed acceptable accuracy values, although many continued to report inadequate results. On the other, almost 29% of the papers that reported the accuracy metric used reflected aspects concerning the validation of the models and 18% reported the effect size when comparing models.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the Adapt@Cloud Project under Grant TIN2017-84550-R.Fernández-Diego, M.; Méndez, ER.; González-Ladrón-De-Guevara, F.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; Insfran, E. (2020). An Update on Effort Estimation in Agile Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review. IEEE Access. 8:166768-166800. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3021664S166768166800

Non-Technical Individual Skills are Weakly Connected to the Maturity of Agile Practices

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 from agile teams in six software development organizations from The Netherlands and Brazil, we analyzed the predictive power of non-technical individual skills in relation to agile practices. Results: The results show that there is surprisingly low power in using non-technical individual skills to predict (i.e. explain variance in) the mature use of agile practices in software development. Conclusions: Therefore, we conclude that looking at non-technical individual skills is not the optimal level of analysis when trying to understand, and explain, the mature use of agile practices in the software development context. We argue that it is more important to focus on the non-technical skills as a team-level capacity instead of assuring that all individuals possess such skills when understanding the use of the agile practices.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur

Empirical research on relative and absolute effort estimation in software development projects

Should we be using relative estimation methods in software effort estimation? This thesis looks into an aspect of agile estimating by comparing the effects of using relative estimation methods with absolute estimation methods for software development effort estimates. The thesis describes a study conducted on a software development project where estimates in story points (relative) and ideal time (absolute) are provided using planning poker

Smart Deployment of Demonstrators into Successful Commercial Solutions

AbstractProduct or service concepts based on emerging technologies are usually results of research projects, be they performed by academic groups or by research departments of companies. Many times, the prototypes or demonstrators that result from such projects are supposed to evolve into commercial products or services, but – at least in the first stage - there are more focus on proving key features of a technology, or the effectiveness / efficiency / applicability of various concepts or algorithms. However, evolving into commercial products is many times at least as challenging as building the prototypes. In case of software-based projects, this means changes in architecture, a lot of code rewriting and important usability improvements. This paper introduces a software-concept product design algorithm which aims to minimize the effort required in turning a demonstrator into a commercial product. This is done by generating two functionality sets: a pure demonstrator and a pure commercial one, then generating a hybrid functionality set with the corresponding architecture, and then assessing each functionality for the demonstrator and the commercial version in terms of development and improvement effort. Through iterations, in which the original functionality sets are improved, the difference between the two perspectives will be reduced until it gets below a reasonable limit in terms of effort. The paper presents a case study in which the algorithm is applied for planning a software platform for supporting SMEs in their innovation processes

Models and metrics for software management and engineering

This paper attempts to characterize and present a state of the art view of several quantitative models and metrics of the software life cycle. These models and metrics can be used to aid in managing and engineering software projects. They deal with various aspects of the software process and product, including resources allocation and estimation, changes and errors, size, complexity and reliability. Some indication is given of the extent to which the various models have been used and the success they have achieved