Coordination in Distributed Agile Software Development: A Systematic Review

In order to decrease the consumer return transaction cost, e-commerce platform Alibaba invited an insurance company to develop a new type of insurance to compensate consumers for returns, which is called return-freight insurance. The new insurance has resulted in online return\u27s explosive growth. However, some online retailers still choose to offer complimentary return-freight insurance to signal their products\u27 quality. Using signaling theory, we build a conceptual economic model to explore what kind of online retailer should adopt this strategy under incomplete information. Based on the fact that each product\u27s return probability, profit, and insurance compensation are different, our main results show the separating equilibria, where only high-quality online retailers will offer complimentary return-freight insurance. Interestingly, return-freight insurance profit and compensation play different roles in the signal effect. The insurance premium plays a deep role while the compensation plays at the surface, because consumers could only observe the compensation when purchasing

Applying Agile Lean to Global Software Development

Although challenges of Global Software Development (GSD) are well known in the industry, practitioners and the organizations look for ways to improve results and overcome challenges. Companies have tried to implement many workable solutions possible to solve issues like poor communication, lack of trust, low morale and many other such issues prevalent in the distributed setting. With the success of agile, the methodology gained interest in leveraging its benefits to alleviate some of these challenges. Similarly, lean was also implemented in distributed software development to resolve issues. While each methodology provided some improvement in the results achieved in global software development, many issues persisted and the desired growth/results were not received. Recent years have seen an increased interest of applying a combination of agile and lean software development paradigms to resolve current industry issues in the area and meet the needs of rapid changing environment. This study aims to study the current practices of the combination of agile lean existing in the industry and how it can be utilized in the global software development. The study focuses on challenges faced to implement agile lean and successful sustainable implementation of agile lean in an environment of global software development

Considerations for Effective Requirements Analysis in Offshore Software Development Projects: Lessons from Multi-method Research

Offshore software development using geographically distributed teams is an accepted practice in software development today. However, software development companies have largely only offshored the software development lifecycle’s coding and testing phases. However, lately, offshoring the requirements analysis (RA) phase has become increasingly viable for several reasons including the software industry’s maturation and improved communication technologies. However, successfully evaluating this highly interactive phase between geographically dispersed client and provider teams requires special considerations. In this paper, we present practical insights garnered from conducting experiments and surveys of IS professionals from the Indian software industry and from extensively examining the literature. Our findings confirm that, subject to certain best practices, one can effectively conduct RA in software projects offshore. We present these practices as lessons learned and provide related recommendations for industry and academia

The Agile Coach Role: Coaching for Agile Performance Impact

It is increasingly common to introduce agile coaches to help gain speed and advantage in agile companies. Following the success of Spotify, the role of the agile coach has branched out in terms of tasks and responsibilities, but little research has been conducted to examine how this role is practiced. This paper examines the role of the agile coach through 19 semi-structured interviews with agile coaches from ten different companies. We describe the role in terms of the tasks the coach has in agile projects, valuable traits, skills, tools, and the enablers of agile coaching. Our findings indicate that agile coaches perform at the team and organizational levels. They affect effort, strategies, knowledge, and skills of the agile teams. The most essential traits of an agile coach are being emphatic, people-oriented, able to listen, diplomatic, and persistent. We suggest empirically based advice for agile coaching, for example companies giving their agile coaches the authority to implement the required organizational changes within and outside the teams.publishedVersio

Scaling Agility in Incumbent Firms: A Literature Review

Scaling agility as a process of applying agile concepts to more extensive parts of the organization promises incumbent firms to achieve the same benefits as their digital competitors. However, copying digital-born companies\u27 approaches seems problematic, as incumbent firms are distinct from their digital competitors. Thus, this research aims to consolidate what we know about scaling agility in incumbent firms. To answer this question, I conduct a structured literature review to understand scaling agility for incumbent firms better, resulting in the four dimensions of structure, methodology, governance, and dependencies with nine themes: coordination, processes, roles, effectiveness, risk management, budgeting, measurement, architecture, and culture/mindset. Moreover, the review develops six avenues for future research. With this, the literature review provides an integrative picture of scaling agility, enhances conceptual clarity, and helps practitioners by providing an overview to use in their efforts to scaling agility in incumbent firms

The Agile Coach Role: Coaching for Agile Performance Impact

It is increasingly common to introduce agile coaches to help gain speed and advantage in agile companies. Following the success of Spotify, the role of the agile coach has branched out in terms of tasks and responsibilities, but little research has been conducted to examine how this role is practiced. This paper examines the role of the agile coach through 19 semi-structured interviews with agile coaches from ten different companies. We describe the role in terms of the tasks the coach has in agile projects, valuable traits, skills, tools, and the enablers of agile coaching. Our findings indicate that agile coaches perform at the team and organizational levels. They affect effort, strategies, knowledge, and skills of the agile teams. The most essential traits of an agile coach are being emphatic, people-oriented, able to listen, diplomatic, and persistent. We suggest empirically based advice for agile coaching, for example companies giving their agile coaches the authority to implement the required organizational changes within and outside the teams

IT Governance and Its Agile Dimensions

Information technology (IT) plays an essential role in organizational innovation adoption. As such, IT governance (ITG) is paramount in accompanying IT to allow innovation. However, the traditional concept of ITG to control the formulation and implementation of IT strategy is not fully equipped to deal with the current changes occurring in the digital age. Today’s ITG needs an agile approach that can respond to changing dynamics. Consequently, companies are relying heavily on agile strategies to secure better company performance. This paper aims to clarify how organizations can implement agile ITG. To do so, this study conducted 56 qualitative interviews with professionals from the banking industry to identify agile dimensions within the governance construct. The qualitative evaluation uncovered 46 agile governance dimensions. Moreover, these dimensions were rated by 29 experts to identify the most effective ones. This led to the identification of six structure elements, eight processes, and eight relational mechanisms

Agility in Information Systems – A Literature Review on Terms and Definitions

Agility is a term used in many works in the context of information systems. When studying the concept closer, it became obvious that there is a terminological heterogeneity preventing a common definition whilst at the same time not preventing the frequent use of the term. In order to approach the term in a structured way, the following two paths were chosen. Firstly, the term was traced back to its roots which showed its first appearance in organisational theory. Secondly, the major IS conferences (ECIS and ICIS) and the requirements engineering conference as a major computer science conference were analysed from 2001 when the agile manifesto was published which led to a wave of works on agility. The descriptive results are presented in the paper

An Empirical Investigation of Pull Requests in Partially Distributed BizDevOps Teams

In globally distributed projects, virtual teams are often partially dispersed. One common setup occurs when several members from one company work with a large outsourcing vendor based in another country. Further, the introduction of the popular BizDevOps concept has increased the necessity to cooperate across departments and reduce the age-old disconnection between the business strategy and technical development. Establishing a good collaboration in partially distributed BizDevOps teams requires extensive collaboration and communication techniques. Nowadays, a common approach is to rely on collaboration through pull requests and frequent communication on Slack. To investigate barriers for pull requests in distributed teams, we examined an organization located in Scandinavia where cross-functional BizDevOps teams collaborated with off-site team members in India. Data were collected by conducting 14 interviews, observing 23 entire days with the team, and observing 37 meetings. We found that the pull-request approach worked very well locally but not across sites. We found barriers such as domain complexity, different agile processes (timeboxed vs. flow-based development), and employee turnover. Using an intellectual capital lens on our findings, we discuss barriers and positive and negative effects on the success of the pull-request approach

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