Customising software products in distributed software development a model for allocating customisation requirements across organisational boundaries

Requirements engineering plays a vital role in the software development process. While it is difficult to manage those requirements locally, it is even more difficult to communicate those requirements over organisational boundaries and to convey them to multiple distribution customers. This paper discusses the requirements of multiple distribution customers empirically in the context of customised software products. The main purpose is to understand the challenges of communicating and allocating customisation requirements across distributed organisational boundaries. We conducted an empirical survey with 19 practitioners, which confirmed that communicating customisation requirements in a DSD context is a significant challenge. We therefore propose a model for allocating customisation requirements between a local, customer-based agile team and a distributed development team that uses a traditional development approach. Our conjecture is that the model would reduce the challenge of communicating requirements across organisational boundaries, address customers’ requirements and provide a focus for future empirical studies

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

Управління міжнародним бізнесом: Agility Journey для високотехнологічних компаній

The purpose of the article is the development of recommendations for the business maturity determination and measurement in the implementation of the agile approach for high-tech companies. Methods of analysis of documents, observation, personal and in-depth interviews, case studies have been used in the research. The findings of the research: Business Agility Journey has been suggested for defining the state of the maturity of the company and conducting express diagnostics of agility. Agile Project Management Journey has been developed for the identification of weaknesses by the companies in the path to agility, as well as for the determination of events for the transition from the traditional to the agile approach. Personal Agility Checklist has been designed for testing the soft skills of employees for the presence of the agile mindset. Research limitations include the study of the maturity of companies in the IT industry. Practical implications are based on the use of suggested Agility Journeys in defining the state of maturity and main problems on the transition path. Also, Personal Agility Checklist will help to check the agility of the future employees. The originality of the article is based on the uniqueness of the Agility Journey that has been developed for the first time. Further research on this topic should be focused on the development of an agile mindset as a prerequisite for the provision of agility in the company.Метою статті є розробка рекомендацій щодо визначення та вимірювання зрілості бізнесу при впровадженні еджайл-підходу для високотехнологічних компаній. У дослідженні використовуються методи аналізу документів, спостереження, особистого та глибинного інтерв’ю та кейс-стаді. Розроблено Business Agility Journey для визначення стану зрілості компанії та проведення експрес-діагностики еджайльності. Agile Project Management Journey було розроблено для визначення компаніями своїх слабких сторін, а також заходів для переходу від традиційного до еджайльного підходу. Personal Agility Checklist був створений для перевірки «гнучких навичок» (soft skills) співробітників на наявність гнучкого мислення (agile mindset). Обмеження досліджень включають вивчення зрілості компаній ІТ-галузі. Практична значущість ґрунтується на використанні запропонованих Agility Journeys для визначення стану зрілості та основних проблем на шляху переходу. Також Personal Agility Checklist допоможе перевірити еджайльність майбутніх працівників. Оригінальність статті базується на унікальності Agility Journey, яка була розроблена вперше. Подальші дослідження на цю тему доцільно зосередити на розвитку гнучкого мислення як передумови забезпечення еджайльності в компанії

Comparative Study on Agile software development methodologies

Today-s business environment is very much dynamic, and organisations are constantly changing their software requirements to adjust with new environment. They also demand for fast delivery of software products as well as for accepting changing requirements. In this aspect, traditional plan-driven developments fail to meet up these requirements. Though traditional software development methodologies, such as life cycle-based structured and object oriented approaches, continue to dominate the systems development few decades and much research has done in traditional methodologies, Agile software development brings its own set of novel challenges that must be addressed to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software. It is a set of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development process, where requirements and development evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams that allows rapid delivery of high quality software to meet customer needs and also accommodate changes in the requirements. In this paper, we significantly identify and describe the major factors, that Agile development approach improves software development process to meet the rapid changing business environments. We also provide a brief comparison of agile development methodologies with traditional systems development methodologies, and discuss current state of adopting agile methodologies. We speculate that from the need to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software, Agile software development is emerged as an alternative to traditional plan-based software development methods. The purpose of this paper, is to provide an in-depth understanding, the major benefits of agile development approach to software development industry, as well as provide a comparison study report of ASDM over TSDM.Comment: 25 pages, 25 images, 86 references used, with authors biographie

Hybrid Software Development Approaches in Practice: A European Perspective

Agile and traditional development approaches are used in combination in todays software development. To improve the understanding and to provide better guidance for selecting appropriate development approaches, it is important to analyze such combinations in practice. Results obtained from an online survey strongly confirm that hybrid development approaches are widely used in industry. Our results show that hybrid development approaches: (i) have become reality for nearly all companies; (ii) are applied to specific projects even in the presence of company-wide policies for process usage; (iii) are neither planned nor designed but emerge from the evolution of different work practices; and, (iv) are consistently used regardless of company size or industry secto

OpenScrum: Scrum methodology to improve shared understanding in an open-source community

While we continue to see rise in the adoption of agile methods for software development, there has been a call to study the appropriateness of agile methods in open-source and other emerging contexts. This paper examines Scrum methodology adopted by a large, globally distributed team which builds an open-source electronic medical records platform called OpenMRS. The research uses a mixed method approach, by doing quantitative analysis of source-code, issue tracker as well as community activity (IRC logs, Mailing lists, wiki) in pre and post Scrum adoption, covering a period of 4 years. Later we conducted semi-structured interviews with core developers and followed it up with group discussions to discuss the analysis of the quantitative data and get their views on our findings. Since the project is "domain heavy", contributors (developers and implementers) need to have certain health informatics understanding before making significant contributions. This puts knowledge-sharing and "bus factor" as critical points of management for the community. The paper presents ideas about a tailored Scrum methodology that might better suited for open-source communities to improve knowledge-sharing and community participation, instead of just agilit