“NO ONE CAN DO IT ALL”: THE (CHANGING) ROLE OF EXTERNAL MANAGERS FOR TEAM EMPOWERMENT IN AGILE TEAMS

Agile software development teams require a high degree of team empowerment, but the necessity of these teams to make autonomous decisions and self-organize is at odds with traditional command-and-control management. As more and more organizations adopt agile methods at a large scale, managers can be either a burden or a facilitator in the endeavor to achieve agility. Prior research has extensively studied internal processes of agile teams, but our understanding of the role of team-external managers is limited. In this research, we conducted a case study in five teams in a large organization currently undergoing an agile transformation. We developed a theoretical model of team-external management and its effects on team empowerment. We provide both recommendations for practitioners and a set of hypotheses for empirical testing in future research

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

Agile methods for agile universities

We explore a term, Agile, that is being used in various workplace settings, including the management of universities. The term may have several related but slightly different meanings. Agile is often used in the context of facilitating more creative problem-solving and advocating for the adoption, design, tailoring and continual updating of more innovative organizational processes. We consider a particular set of meanings of the term from the world of software development. Agile methods were created to address certain problems with the software development process. Many of those problems have interesting analogues in the context of universities, so a reflection on agile methods may be a useful heuristic for generating ideas for enabling universities to be more creative

Управління міжнародним бізнесом: Agility Journey для високотехнологічних компаній

The purpose of the article is the development of recommendations for the business maturity determination and measurement in the implementation of the agile approach for high-tech companies. Methods of analysis of documents, observation, personal and in-depth interviews, case studies have been used in the research. The findings of the research: Business Agility Journey has been suggested for defining the state of the maturity of the company and conducting express diagnostics of agility. Agile Project Management Journey has been developed for the identification of weaknesses by the companies in the path to agility, as well as for the determination of events for the transition from the traditional to the agile approach. Personal Agility Checklist has been designed for testing the soft skills of employees for the presence of the agile mindset. Research limitations include the study of the maturity of companies in the IT industry. Practical implications are based on the use of suggested Agility Journeys in defining the state of maturity and main problems on the transition path. Also, Personal Agility Checklist will help to check the agility of the future employees. The originality of the article is based on the uniqueness of the Agility Journey that has been developed for the first time. Further research on this topic should be focused on the development of an agile mindset as a prerequisite for the provision of agility in the company.Метою статті є розробка рекомендацій щодо визначення та вимірювання зрілості бізнесу при впровадженні еджайл-підходу для високотехнологічних компаній. У дослідженні використовуються методи аналізу документів, спостереження, особистого та глибинного інтерв’ю та кейс-стаді. Розроблено Business Agility Journey для визначення стану зрілості компанії та проведення експрес-діагностики еджайльності. Agile Project Management Journey було розроблено для визначення компаніями своїх слабких сторін, а також заходів для переходу від традиційного до еджайльного підходу. Personal Agility Checklist був створений для перевірки «гнучких навичок» (soft skills) співробітників на наявність гнучкого мислення (agile mindset). Обмеження досліджень включають вивчення зрілості компаній ІТ-галузі. Практична значущість ґрунтується на використанні запропонованих Agility Journeys для визначення стану зрілості та основних проблем на шляху переходу. Також Personal Agility Checklist допоможе перевірити еджайльність майбутніх працівників. Оригінальність статті базується на унікальності Agility Journey, яка була розроблена вперше. Подальші дослідження на цю тему доцільно зосередити на розвитку гнучкого мислення як передумови забезпечення еджайльності в компанії

Comparative Study on Agile software development methodologies

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 development brings its own set of novel challenges that must be addressed to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software. It is a set of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development process, where requirements and development evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams that allows rapid delivery of high quality software to meet customer needs and also accommodate changes in the requirements. In this paper, we significantly identify and describe the major factors, that Agile development approach improves software development process to meet the rapid changing business environments. We also provide a brief comparison of agile development methodologies with traditional systems development methodologies, and discuss current state of adopting agile methodologies. We speculate that from the need to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software, Agile software development is emerged as an alternative to traditional plan-based software development methods. The purpose of this paper, is to provide an in-depth understanding, the major benefits of agile development approach to software development industry, as well as provide a comparison study report of ASDM over TSDM.Comment: 25 pages, 25 images, 86 references used, with authors biographie

An approach to reconcile the agile and CMMI contexts in product line development

Software product line approaches produce reusable platforms and architectures for products set developed by specific companies. These approaches are strategic in nature requiring coordination, discipline, commonality and communication. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) contains important guidelines for process improvement, and specifies "what" we must have into account to achieve the disciplined processes (among others things). On the other hand, the agile context is playing an increasingly important role in current software engineering practices, specifying "how" the software practices must be addressed to obtain agile processes. In this paper, we carry out a preliminary analysis for reconciling agility and maturity models in software product line domain, taking advantage of both.Postprint (published version

A Scrum-based approach to CMMI maturity level 2 in Web Development environments

Scrum has become one of the most popular agile methodologies, either alone or combined with other agile practices. Besides, CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) is accepted as a suitable model to measure the maturity of the organizations when developing or acquiring software. Although these two approaches are often considered antagonist, the use of an agile approach to reach certain CMMI maturity levels may result beneficial to organizations that develop Web systems, since they would take the advantages of both approaches. In Web community, this union may be very interesting, because agile approaches fits with the special needs of Web development, and they could be a useful tool for companies getting a certain grade of maturity. This work analyzes the goals of CMMI maturity level 2 and the feasibility of achieving them using the practices proposed by Scrum, trying to assess whether the use of this methodology is suitable for meeting the CMMI generic and specific goals or not. Finally, and based on this analysis, this paper raises a possible extension of Scrum, based on agile techniques, to accommodate the CMMI maturity level 2.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2010-20057-C03-02Junta de Andalucía TIC-578

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