TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF AGILE ISD LEADERSHIP

Leadership influences the success of any project, including agile information systems development (ISD) projects. In fact, agile ISD projects are nowadays the ISD method of choice in practice irrespectively of the size of the project - either small or large projects. There, leadership is crucial because it transcends and influences other factors, such as team motivation and commitment. However, knowledge of agile ISD leadership is limited as research in this area is rare. This study aims to reveal how leadership manifests in an agile ISD project, specifically in the setting of large-scale projects. To investigate leadership in an agile ISD project, we conducted a qualitative case study and interviewed 12 agile ISD practitioners from three teams. Preliminary results show that personal attributes, attitudes, and behaviors of the leader are important for agile ISD leadership to be effective. Based on those characteristics, we develop a theoretical framework about leadership for agile ISD projects. Keywords: Leadership, Agile, Large-scale ISD, Case study

A mapping study on documentation in Continuous Software Development

Context: With an increase in Agile, Lean, and DevOps software methodologies over the last years (collectively referred to as Continuous Software Development (CSD)), we have observed that documentation is often poor. Objective: This work aims at collecting studies on documentation challenges, documentation practices, and tools that can support documentation in CSD. Method: A systematic mapping study was conducted to identify and analyze research on documentation in CSD, covering publications between 2001 and 2019. Results: A total of 63 studies were selected. We found 40 studies related to documentation practices and challenges, and 23 studies related to tools used in CSD. The challenges include: informal documentation is hard to understand, documentation is considered as waste, productivity is measured by working software only, documentation is out-of-sync with the software and there is a short-term focus. The practices include: non-written and informal communication, the usage of development artifacts for documentation, and the use of architecture frameworks. We also made an inventory of numerous tools that can be used for documentation purposes in CSD. Overall, we recommend the usage of executable documentation, modern tools and technologies to retrieve information and transform it into documentation, and the practice of minimal documentation upfront combined with detailed design for knowledge transfer afterwards. Conclusion: It is of paramount importance to increase the quantity and quality of documentation in CSD. While this remains challenging, practitioners will benefit from applying the identified practices and tools in order to mitigate the stated challenges

On the real world practice of Behaviour Driven Development

Surveys of industry practice over the last decade suggest that Behaviour Driven Development is a popular Agile practice. For example, 19% of respondents to the 14th State of Agile annual survey reported using BDD, placing it in the top 13 practices reported. As well as potential benefits, the adoption of BDD necessarily involves an additional cost of writing and maintaining Gherkin features and scenarios, and (if used for acceptance testing,) the associated step functions. Yet there is a lack of published literature exploring how BDD is used in practice and the challenges experienced by real world software development efforts. This gap is significant because without understanding current real world practice, it is hard to identify opportunities to address and mitigate challenges. In order to address this research gap concerning the challenges of using BDD, this thesis reports on a research project which explored: (a) the challenges of applying agile and undertaking requirements engineering in a real world context; (b) the challenges of applying BDD specifically and (c) the application of BDD in open-source projects to understand challenges in this different context. For this purpose, we progressively conducted two case studies, two series of interviews, four iterations of action research, and an empirical study. The first case study was conducted in an avionics company to discover the challenges of using an agile process in a large scale safety critical project environment. Since requirements management was found to be one of the biggest challenges during the case study, we decided to investigate BDD because of its reputation for requirements management. The second case study was conducted in the company with an aim to discover the challenges of using BDD in real life. The case study was complemented with an empirical study of the practice of BDD in open source projects, taking a study sample from the GitHub open source collaboration site. As a result of this Ph.D research, we were able to discover: (i) challenges of using an agile process in a large scale safety-critical organisation, (ii) current state of BDD in practice, (iii) technical limitations of Gherkin (i.e., the language for writing requirements in BDD), (iv) challenges of using BDD in a real project, (v) bad smells in the Gherkin specifications of open source projects on GitHub. We also presented a brief comparison between the theoretical description of BDD and BDD in practice. This research, therefore, presents the results of lessons learned from BDD in practice, and serves as a guide for software practitioners planning on using BDD in their projects

Managing non‐functional requirements in agile software development

Non‐functional requirements define qualities of the software system that ensure effectiveness while embedding any constraints and restrictions on the design. A challenge rises with agile implementation in handling non‐function requirements in regulated environments. Thus, a practitioner's perceptions of agile method tailoring are described in relation to inter‐team boundaries and non‐functional requirements. The research comprises 18 practitioner interviews from two multinational agile software development companies. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analysed using an approach informed by grounded theory and information flow models were used to compare and contrast interactions of processes. It was discovered that one of the case study companies managed non‐functional requirements as artefacts in their agile methodology, while the other company reverts to conventional plan‐based software development practices of documentation, timeline estimations, and safety critical requirements. This research creates a detailed comparison of these contrasting approaches. The main contribution of this study is a set of proposed recommendations to deal with non‐functional requirements in a regulated environment using agile techniques. The introduction of two new artefacts, Documentation Work Item and Safety Critical Work Item, is recommended and it is accompanied with an illustrative example, to transform the handling of documentation and safety critical requirements in a more agile way

A holistic method for improving software product and process quality

The concept of quality in general is elusive, multi-faceted and is perceived differently by different stakeholders. Quality is difficult to define and extremely difficult to measure. Deficient software systems regularly result in failures which often lead to significant financial losses but more importantly to loss of human lives. Such systems need to be either scrapped and replaced by new ones or corrected/improved through maintenance. One of the most serious challenges is how to deal with legacy systems which, even when not failing, inevitably require upgrades, maintenance and improvement because of malfunctioning or changing requirements, or because of changing technologies, languages, or platforms. In such cases, the dilemma is whether to develop solutions from scratch or to re-engineer a legacy system. This research addresses this dilemma and seeks to establish a rigorous method for the derivation of indicators which, together with management criteria, can help decide whether restructuring of legacy systems is advisable. At the same time as the software engineering community has been moving from corrective methods to preventive methods, concentrating not only on both product quality improvement and process quality improvement has become imperative. This research investigation combines Product Quality Improvement, primarily through the re-engineering of legacy systems; and Process Improvement methods, models and practices, and uses a holistic approach to study the interplay of Product and Process Improvement. The re-engineering factor rho, a composite metric was proposed and validated. The design and execution of formal experiments tested hypotheses on the relationship of internal (code-based) and external (behavioural) metrics. In addition to proving the hypotheses, the insights gained on logistics challenges resulted in the development of a framework for the design and execution of controlled experiments in Software Engineering. The next part of the research resulted in the development of the novel, generic and, hence, customisable Quality Model GEQUAMO, which observes the principle of orthogonality, and combines a top-down analysis of the identification, classification and visualisation of software quality characteristics, and a bottom-up method for measurement and evaluation. GEQUAMO II addressed weaknesses that were identified during various GEQUAMO implementations and expert validation by academics and practitioners. Further work on Process Improvement investigated the Process Maturity and its relationship to Knowledge Sharing, resulted in the development of the I5P Visualisation Framework for Performance Estimation through the Alignment of Process Maturity and Knowledge Sharing. I5P was used in industry and was validated by experts from academia and industry. Using the principles that guided the creation of the GEQUAMO model, the CoFeD visualisation framework, was developed for comparative quality evaluation and selection of methods, tools, models and other software artifacts. CoFeD is very useful as the selection of wrong methods, tools or even personnel is detrimental to the survival and success of projects and organisations, and even to individuals. Finally, throughout the many years of research and teaching Software Engineering, Information Systems, Methodologies, I observed the ambiguities of terminology and the use of one term to mean different concepts and one concept to be expressed in different terms. These practices result in lack of clarity. Thus my final contribution comes in my reflections on terminology disambiguation for the achievement of clarity, and the development of a framework for achieving disambiguation of terms as a necessary step towards gaining maturity and justifying the use of the term “Engineering” 50 years since the term Software Engineering was coined. This research resulted in the creation of new knowledge in the form of novel indicators, models and frameworks which can aid quantification and decision making primarily on re-engineering of legacy code and on the management of process and its improvement. The thesis also contributes to the broader debate and understanding of problems relating to Software Quality, and establishes the need for a holistic approach to software quality improvement from both the product and the process perspectives

Mathematics in Software Reliability and Quality Assurance

This monograph concerns the mathematical aspects of software reliability and quality assurance and consists of 11 technical papers in this emerging area. Included are the latest research results related to formal methods and design, automatic software testing, software verification and validation, coalgebra theory, automata theory, hybrid system and software reliability modeling and assessment

Overcoming team boundaries in agile software development

The usage of agile software development methods is increasing and so is the need for enhancing the collaboration between the different stakeholders. Thus, we chose to investigate the communication tools and challenges across the different boundaries and consequently deduce implications for practitioners. This research addresses inter-team communication by exploring the practitioners' perception on the different communication tools and the challenges faced at the three different boundaries, inter-team, team and customers, and geographically separated teams. We aim to enhance the productivity of software development through enhancing the communication between the different stakeholders. In this research, we use grounded theory approach to gather data from semi-structured open-ended interviews with practitioners in a geographically separated software development company. The findings observed three main inter-team communication means (Slack, Trello, face-to-face) used by practitioners, and how the preference differs among practitioners. This study also focuses on the different challenges faced, such as absence of communication during user story dependency, unclear customer requirements, and cultural differences, when implementing agile across different geographical locations. Our study discovers how team boundaries are overcome when team members adapt to other teams’ preferred communication tool and enhance the boundary spanners’ role. Furthermore, the study highlights how novice and mature teams require a transition time to adjust to the agile methods

Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2022, which was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in June 2022. XP is the premier agile software development conference combining research and practice. It is a unique forum where agile researchers, practitioners, thought leaders, coaches, and trainers get together to present and discuss their most recent innovations, research results, experiences, concerns, challenges, and trends.  XP conferences provide an informal environment to learn and trigger discussions and welcome both people new to agile and seasoned agile practitioners. This year’s conference was held with the theme “Agile in the Era of Hybrid Work”. The 13 full papers and 1 short paper presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: agile practices; agile processes; and agile in the large