Human Factors in Agile Software Development

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 Simple Multi-Agent Real-Time (SMART) approach to enhance intelligent task allocation for ASD process, 3) a Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) based method to enhance emotion and morale management for ASD process, 4) the first large scale in-depth empirical insights on human factors in ASD process which have not yet been well studied by existing research, and 5) the first to identify ASD process as a human-computation system that exploit human efforts to perform tasks that computers are not good at solving. On the other hand, computers can assist human decision making in the ASD process.Comment: Book Draf

Challenges in Developing Applications for Aging Populations

Elderly individuals can greatly benefit from the use of computer applications, which can assist in monitoring health conditions, staying in contact with friends and family, and even learning new things. However, developing accessible applications for an elderly user can be a daunting task for developers. Since the advent of the personal computer, the benefits and challenges of developing applications for older adults have been a hot topic of discussion. In this chapter, the authors discuss the various challenges developers who wish to create applications for the elderly computer user face, including age-related impairments, generational differences in computer use, and the hardware constraints mobile devices pose for application developers. Although these challenges are concerning, each can be overcome after being properly identified

Toward Accountable and Explainable Artificial Intelligence Part Two: The Framework Implementation

This paper builds upon the theoretical foundations of the Accountable eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (AXAI) capability framework presented in part one of this paper.We demonstrate incorporation of the AXAI capability in the real time Affective State Assessment Module (ASAM) of a robotic system. We show that adhering to the eXtreme Programming (XP) practices would help in understanding user behavior and systematic incorporation of the AXAI capability in AI systems. We further show that a collaborative software design and development process (SDDP) would facilitate identification of ethical, technical, functional, and domain-specific system requirements. Meeting these requirements would increase user confidence in AI systems. Our results show that the ASAM can synthesize discrete and continuous models of affective state expressions for classifying them in real-time. The ASAM continuously shares important inputs, processed data and the output information with users via a graphical user interface (GUI). Thus, the GUI provides reasons behind system decisions and disseminates information about local reasoning, data handling and decision-making. Through this demonstrated work, we expect to move toward enhancing AI systems’ acceptability, utility and establishing a chain of responsibility if a system fails. We hope this work will initiate further investigations on developing the AXAI capability and use of a suitable SDDP for incorporating them in AI systems

Have the Agile Principles Endured? An Empirical Investigation Post 20th Anniversary of the Agile Manifesto (2001)

This study investigates whether the Agile principles introduced in the Agile Manifesto (2001) have endured today two decades later and whether they are still relevant to software developers. Further, are they positively correlated with work and affective outcomes of software development projects? We find out by conducting a survey with team members of 58 software development project in one of the largest global IT firms. To our surprise we find that overall, the Agile principles have endured and were positively correlated with team motivation, project effectiveness and project innovation. However, they were negative correlated with project efficiency. As expected, projects using Agile and plan-driven methodologies showed differential findings

Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2020, which was planned to be held during June 8-12, 2020, at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was postponed until an undetermined date. XP is the premier agile software development conference combining research and practice. It is a hybrid forum where agile researchers, academics, practitioners, thought leaders, coaches, and trainers get together to present and discuss their most recent innovations, research results, experiences, concerns, challenges, and trends. Following this history, for both researchers and seasoned practitioners XP 2020 provided an informal environment to network, share, and discover trends in Agile for the next 20 years. The 14 full and 2 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: agile adoption; agile practices; large-scale agile; the business of agile; and agile and testing

Have the Agile Values endured? An empirical investigation on the 20th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto (2001)

This study investigates whether the Agile Values introduced in the Agile Manifesto (2001) have endured today two decades later and whether they are still relevant to software developers. Further, are they positively correlated with work and affective outcomes of software development projects? We find out by conducting a survey with team members of 58 software development project in one of the largest global IT firms. To our surprise we find all the four Agile values have endured. The agile values still resonated with software developers. Additionally, overall, the values were positively correlated with team motivation, project effectiveness and project innovation. However, they were negative correlated with project efficiency and had no correlation with work exhaustion of team members. As expected, projects using Agile and plan-driven methodologies showed differential findings