51,886 research outputs found
Estimating, planning and managing Agile Web development projects under a value-based perspective
Context: The processes of estimating, planning and managing are crucial for software development projects,
since the results must be related to several business strategies. The broad expansion of the Internet
and the global and interconnected economy make Web development projects be often characterized by
expressions like delivering as soon as possible, reducing time to market and adapting to undefined
requirements. In this kind of environment, traditional methodologies based on predictive techniques
sometimes do not offer very satisfactory results. The rise of Agile methodologies and practices has
provided some useful tools that, combined with Web Engineering techniques, can help to establish a
framework to estimate, manage and plan Web development projects.
Objective: This paper presents a proposal for estimating, planning and managing Web projects, by
combining some existing Agile techniques with Web Engineering principles, presenting them as an
unified framework which uses the business value to guide the delivery of features.
Method: The proposal is analyzed by means of a case study, including a real-life project, in order to obtain
relevant conclusions.
Results: The results achieved after using the framework in a development project are presented, including
interesting results on project planning and estimation, as well as on team productivity throughout the
project.
Conclusion: It is concluded that the framework can be useful in order to better manage Web-based
projects, through a continuous value-based estimation and management process.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-
Requirements Prioritisation and Retrospective Analysis for Release Planning Process Improvement
The quality of a product can be defined by its ability to satisfy the needs and expectations of its customers. Achieving quality is especially difficult in market-driven situations since the product is released on an open market with numerous potential customers and users with various wishes. The quality of the software product is to a large extent determined by the quality of the requirements engineering (RE) and release planning decisions regarding which requirements that are selected for a product. The goal of this thesis is to enhance software product quality and increase the competitive edge of software organisations by improving release planning decision-making. The thesis is based on empirical research, including both qualitative and quantitative research approaches. The research contains a qualitative survey of RE challenges in market-driven organisations based on interviews with practitioners. The survey provided increased understanding of RE challenges in the software industry and gave input to the continued research. Among the challenging issues, one was selected for further investigation due to its high relevance to the practitioners: requirements prioritisation and release planning decision-making. Requirements prioritisation techniques were evaluated through experiments, suggesting that ordinal scale techniques based on grouping and ranking may be valuable to practitioners. Finally, a retrospective method called PARSEQ (Post-release Analysis of Requirements SElection Quality) is introduced and tested in three case studies. The method aims at evaluating prior releases and finding improvement proposals for release planning decision-making in future release projects. The method was found valuable by all participants and relevant improvement proposals were discovered in all cases
Coordinating Knowledge Work in Multi-Team Programs: Findings from a Large-Scale Agile Development Program
Software development projects have undergone remarkable changes with the
arrival of agile development methods. While intended for small, self-managing
teams, these methods are increasingly used also for large development programs.
A major challenge in programs is to coordinate the work of many teams, due to
high uncertainty in tasks, a high degree of interdependence between tasks and
because of the large number of people involved. This revelatory case study
focuses on how knowledge work is coordinated in large-scale agile development
programs by providing a rich description of the coordination practices used and
how these practices change over time in a four year development program with 12
development teams. The main findings highlight the role of coordination modes
based on feedback, the use of a number of mechanisms far beyond what is
described in practitioner advice, and finally how coordination practices change
over time. The findings are important to improve the outcome of large
knowledge-based development programs by tailoring coordination practices to
needs and ensuring adjustment over time.Comment: To appear in Project Management Journa
Final Report from the Models for Change Evaluation
Note: This evaluation is accompanied by an evaluation of the National Campaign for this initiative as well as introduction to the evaluation effort by MacArthur's President, Julia Stasch, and a response to the evaluation from the program team. Access these related materials here (https://www.macfound.org/press/grantee-publications/evaluation-models-change-initiative).Models for Change is an initiative of The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundationto accelerate juvenile justice reforms and promote fairer, more effective, and more developmentally appropriate juvenile justice systems throughout the United States. Between 2004 and 2014, the Foundation invested more than $121 million in the initiative, intending to create sustainable and replicable models of systems reform.In June 2013, the Foundation partnered with Mathematica Policy Research and the University of Maryland to design and conduct a retrospective evaluation of Models for Change. The evaluation focused on the core state strategy, the action network strategy, and the national context in which Models for Change played out. This report is a digest and synthesis of several technical reports prepared as part of the evaluation
Inside the brain of an elite athlete: The neural processes that support high achievement in sports
Events like the World Championships in athletics and the Olympic Games raise the public profile of competitive sports. They may also leave us wondering what sets the competitors in these events apart from those of us who simply watch. Here we attempt to link neural and cognitive processes that have been found to be important for elite performance with computational and physiological theories inspired by much simpler laboratory tasks. In this way we hope to inspire neuroscientists to consider how their basic research might help to explain sporting skill at the highest levels of performance
Identifying Agile Requirements Engineering Patterns in Industry
Agile Software Development (ASD) is gaining in popularity in today´s business world. Industry is adopting agile methodologies both to accelerate value delivery and to enhance the ability to deal with changing requirements. However, ASD has a great impact on how Requirements Engineering (RE) is carried out in agile environments. The integration of Human-Centered Design (HCD) plays an important role due to the focus on user and stakeholder involvement. To this end, we aim to introduce agile RE patterns as main objective of this paper. On the one hand, we will describe our pattern mining process based on empirical research in literature and industry. On the other hand, we will discuss our results and provide two examples of agile RE patterns. In sum, the pattern mining process identifies 41 agile RE patterns. The accumulated knowledge will be shared by means of a web application.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED
- …