How Do Real Options Concepts Fit in Agile Requirements Engineering?

Agile requirements engineering is driven by creating business value for the client and heavily involves the client in decision-making under uncertainty. Real option thinking seems to be suitable in supporting the client’s decision making process at inter-iteration time. This paper investigates the fit between real option thinking and agile requirements engineering. We first look into previously published experiences in the agile software engineering literature to identify (i) ‘experience clusters’ suggesting the ways in which real option concepts fit into the agile requirements process and (ii) ‘experience gaps’ and under-researched agile requirements decision-making topics which require further empirical studies. Furthermore, we conducted a cross-case study in eight agile development organizations and interviewed 11 practitioners about their decision-making process. The results suggest that options are almost always identified, reasoned about and acted upon. They are not expressed in quantitative terms, however, they are instead explicitly or implicitly taken\ud into account during the decision-making process at interiteration time

How Agile Workers Make Sense of Managerial Communication

TITLE How Agile Workers Make Sense of Managerial Communication AUTHORS Anna Hagberg, Yang Li & Farah Khanjar SUPERVISOR Katie Sullivan DATE 23rd May 2014 PURPOSE The purpose of the research project is to contribute to agile communication theory with insights about how agile workers make sense of managerial communication. RELEVANCE Due to the rapid changes organizations in the software development industry are now facing, the use of agile practices has become popular. Also, taking the agile workers perspective has a tendency to be neglected in literature on agile practices. METHODOLOGY This qualitative research has been conducted with an interpretative approach, using an abductive method when working with data and theory. In total, we conducted 12 semi-structured interviews and analyzed them using hermeneutics. FINDINGS We discovered that there is a tension between agile workers and management and also that managers should use a mix of communication channels when communicating with agile workers. CONTRIBUTIONS We contributed with an in-depth understanding of how agile workers make sense of managerial communication. We also contributed to literature on agile practices by identifying the tension between the self-organized teams and management, specifically in large-sized companies. KEY-WORDS Agile workers, agile communication, agile practices, self-organized teams, managers, SCRUM, managerial communicatio