Distributed software development in a financial services organisation

The outsourcing of IS functionality to offshore development firms has been a growth industry that has blossomed over the last 10 years. This is as a result of organisations, seeking to optimise costs, mitigate risks, and achieve greater return on shareholder value by delegating the delivery of business information systems and applications to third party vendors. At the same time, distributed approaches to software development has arisen, there has been a growing interest in the applicability of lightweight or Agile development methodologies. As such, this paper this paper discusses experiences of a European Financial Services firm in outsourcing, and subsequently offshoring, two of its IT projects to vendor firms in India, where Agile approaches were used. The authors provide a model of the financial firm’s critical success factors presented as a frame of reference for others interested and involved in this topical area

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

Pair programming and the re-appropriation of individual tools for collaborative software development

Although pair programming is becoming more prevalent in software development, and a number of reports have been written about it [10] [13], few have addressed the manner in which pairing actually takes place [12]. Even fewer consider the methods used to manage issues such as role change or the communication of complex issues. This paper highlights the way resources designed for individuals are re-appropriated and augmented by pair programmers to facilitate collaboration. It also illustrates that pair verbalisations can augment the benefits of the collocated team, providing examples from ethnographic studies of pair programmers 'in the wild'

Dependency Management in Large-Scale Agile: A Case Study of DevOps Teams

Managing dependencies between teams and within teams is critical when running large-scale agile projects. In large-scale software development, work is carried out simultaneously by many developers and development teams. Results are delivered frequently and iteratively, which requires management of dependencies on both the project and team level. This study explores coordination mechanisms in agile DevOps teams in a large-scale project and how the mechanisms address different types of dependencies. We conducted a case study where we observed 38 scheduled meetings and interviewed members of five DevOps teams and two teams supporting the DevOps teams. By using a dependency taxonomy, we identified 20 coordination mechanisms (eleven synchronization activities and nine synchronization artifacts). Eight of these mechanisms seem essential for coordination in large-scale projects because they addressed more than four types of dependencies. The main implication is that project management needs to combine many practices handling all the dependencies in large-scale projects

Integrative Use of Information Extraction, Semantic Matchmaking and Adaptive Coupling Techniques in Support of Distributed Information Processing and Decision-Making

In order to press maximal cognitive benefit from their social, technological and informational environments, military coalitions need to understand how best to exploit available information assets as well as how best to organize their socially-distributed information processing activities. The International Technology Alliance (ITA) program is beginning to address the challenges associated with enhanced cognition in military coalition environments by integrating a variety of research and development efforts. In particular, research in one component of the ITA ('Project 4: Shared Understanding and Information Exploitation') is seeking to develop capabilities that enable military coalitions to better exploit and distribute networked information assets in the service of collective cognitive outcomes (e.g. improved decision-making). In this paper, we provide an overview of the various research activities in Project 4. We also show how these research activities complement one another in terms of supporting coalition-based collective cognition

Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming: 18th International Conference, XP 2017, Cologne, Germany, May 22-26, 2017, Proceedings

agile software development; lean development; scrum; project management; software developmen

A taxonomy of dependencies in agile software development

Dependencies in a software project can contribute to unsatisfactory progress if they constrain or block the flow of work. Various studies highlight the importance of dependencies in the organisation of work; however dependencies in agile software development projects have not previously been a research focus. Drawing on three case studies of agile software projects, and the IS literature, this paper develops an initial taxonomy of agile software project dependencies. Three distinct categories of dependency are found: task, resource, and knowledge dependencies. This paper contributes to theory by providing a taxonomy of dependency types occurring in the area of agile software development. Practitioners can use this taxonomy as sensitising device to ensure they consider dependencies they might face that could hinder their projects, enabling them to take appropriate and timely mitigating action.<br /