Reproducibility in AGILE: experiences, achievements, and recommendations

Este artículo describe las experiencias, actividades realizadas, recursos generados y recomendaciones para la promoción e incentivación de prácticas en investigación reproducible en el campo de la ciencia de la información geográfica. Aunque el artículo se centra en la comunidad y conferencia AGILE (Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe), creemos que los recursos y lecciones aprendidas pueden ser extrapolables a comunidades y asociaciones científicas afines en otras regiones, como puede ser Latinoamérica. En este sentido, hacemos especial hincapié en la descripción de las directrices para la redacción de artículos reproducibles propuestas en el seno de AGILE, así como en una serie de recomendaciones dirigidas principalmente a asociaciones y organizadores de conferencias científicas para la adopción y promoción paulatina de dichas prácticas. Se trata pues de una llamada a la comunidad Latinoamérica de la ciencia de la información geográfica a que consideren los recursos aquí detallados con el fin de incentivar la investigación reproducible en sus comunidades científicas.This article describes the experiences, activities carried out, resources generated and recommendations for the promotion of practices in reproducible research in the field of geographic information science. Although the article focuses on the AGILE (Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe) community and conference, we believe that the resources and lessons learned can be extrapolated to related scientific communities and associations in other regions, such as Latin America. In this regard, we place special emphasis on the description of the guidelines for reproducible articles proposed within AGILE, as well as on a series of recommendations directed mainly to associations and organisers of scientific conferences for the gradual adoption and promotion of these practices. It is therefore a call to the Latin American GIScience community to consider the resources detailed here in order to encourage reproducible research in their scientific communities

Handling requirements dependencies in agile projects: A focus group with agile software development practitioners

Agile practices on requirements dependencies are a relatively unexplored topic in literature. Empirical studies on it are scarce. This research sets out to uncover concepts that practitioners in companies of various sizes across the globe and in various industries, use for dealing with requirements dependencies in their agile software projects. Concepts were revealed through online focus group research, using an adapted forum for discussion, and grounded theory to analyze the responses. Our study resulted in the following findings: (1) requirements dependencies occur in agile projects and are important to these projects' success just as this is known for `traditional' software projects'; (2) requirements dependencies (i) were considered and treated as part of risk management, (ii) were deemed a responsibility of the individual team members, and (iii) mostly did affect project planning; (3) continuous communication and collaboration - two essential features of any agile method, were found critical to mitigating the risks due to dependencies; (4) a hybrid approach to architecture between agile and plan-driven methods was perceived to yield maximum scalability and help coping with dependencies; (5) `cross-cutting concerns', a category of dependencies, were not uniformly understood in an agile context and require more research

An Alliance-Based Term Project in Software Quality Courses: a Lesson Learned

Software testing education has become important in the field of software engineering education. In the previous software quality assurance course, students were asked to form teams to complete a term project. By working on term projects, students can learn programming skills and test skills in a practical way. However, from the experience of the last 3 years, we found that students only did unit testing and system performance testing well but did poorly in integration testing. In addition, students do not yet have the concept of system decomposition and integration, even though it is important during software development. In this paper we report our improvements to software testing course design - an alliance-based approach. In the term project, students are organized into teams and many teams are grouped into alliances. Each alliance has a team of masters building game platforms for others. The master team must define the application interface to interact with other gaming teams, and they must perform integration tests based on the defined interface. In this paper we report our experiences and student feedback on the educational approach

The challenges of becoming agile – experiences from new product development in industry and design education

During the last decade agile methods have been a vast success in the domain of software development. This paper investigates whether these methods can be successfully transferred to the domain of physical product development in order to address the fundamental challenges of increased marked speed, development uncertainty and product complexity. The paper compares two cases from industry and education where agile methods are used in physical product development. The comparison between the cases is conducted within five thematic areas, which creates an overview of the challenges that may occur when implementing agile methods. The present paper is concluded by a discussion and conclusion drawing up the main challenges experienced and well as the benefits of utilising agile methods in physical product development

Project management in practice: Views from the Trenches

Software development has endured radical change with the introduction of agile methods for creating software solutions. This change has prompted new considerations of how software creation should be managed. While agile methods have changed software development processes, it would be premature to assume that has also induced modification in higher-level project management processes. Software development lifecycles (SDLC) and project management lifecycles (PLC), while associated, are not the same thing and it is still unclear to what degree the overarching project management tasks, tools or techniques must change or adapt to meet the needs of undertaking successful agile projects. This exploratory pilot study investigated agile methods used to manage software projects and was conducted via an online survey and restricted to a specific sample audience with significant project experience and with background in both traditional and agile development methods. The results indicate that traditional project management phases and techniques are adapted to fit with agile. However, as the discipline evolves the potential exists for a pure agile project management framework to surface -one that can be applied to better suit the needs of the management of agile projects as well as projects beyond the realm of software development