Intangible trust requirements - how to fill the requirements trust "gap"?

Previous research efforts have been expended in terms of the capture and subsequent instantiation of "soft" trust requirements that relate to HCI usability concerns or in relation to "hard" tangible security requirements that primarily relate to security a ssurance and security protocols. Little direct focus has been paid to managing intangible trust related requirements per se. This 'gap' is perhaps most evident in the public B2C (Business to Consumer) E- Systems we all use on a daily basis. Some speculative suggestions are made as to how to fill the 'gap'. Visual card sorting is suggested as a suitable evaluative tool; whilst deontic logic trust norms and UML extended notation are the suggested (methodologically invariant) means by which software development teams can perhaps more fully capture hence visualize intangible trust requirements

Business Value Is not only Dollars - Results from Case Study Research on Agile Software Projects

Business value is a key concept in agile software development. This paper presents results of a case study on how business value and its creation is perceived in the context of agile projects. Our overall conclusion is that the project participants almost never use an explicit and structured approach to guide the value creation throughout the project. Still, the application of agile methods in the studied cases leads to satisfied clients. An interesting result of the study represents the fact that the agile process of many projects differs significantly from what is described in the agile practitioners’ books as best practices. The key implication for research and practice is that we have an incentive to pursue the study of value creation in agile projects and to complement it by providing guidelines for better client’s involvement, as well as by developing structured methods that will enhance the value-creation in a project

Role of Agile Methods in Global Software Development

Currently software companies are developing the software applications that are developed by global software development teams. In order to develop the quality and cost effective software applications, companies are trying to adopt new methodologies for the global software development. Using of agile in global software development industry yielded benefits and challenges too. The researchers show that agile has many benefits in the software development and fewer complications. But suggesting the agile software development to the global projects is more challenging. This paper focuses on presenting the benefits and challenges in adopting the agile in global software development projects

A Rhetorical Analysis of the Agile Manifesto on its 20th Anniversary

The Agile Software Development (ASD) method is guided by the Agile manifesto which consists of an Agile philosophy and a set of 12 principles. However, despite the indisputable impact of Agile philosophy and principles on software development around the world, the phenomenon of its popularity has not received requisite attention by researchers. In this article we use the rhetorical analysis by focus group of eight industry experts and academics to understand the appeal and attractiveness of ASD to the software development community. We discover that the time was ripe for its introduction with many paradigms and established approaches getting challenged due to rapid pace of technological changes and rise in business uncertainties. The Agile manifesto and its principles tapped into the mood of the moment and perhaps unwittingly through an amalgamation of popular theories of the time from management and manufacturing created a movement generally welcomed by the software developers, but which intrigued many among the software engineering community who were traditionally strong adherents of Taylorism and its principles

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

An agile enterprise architecture driven model for geographically distributed agile development

Agile development is a highly collaborative environment, which requires active communication (i.e. effective and efficient communication) among stakeholders. The active communication in geographically distributed agile development (GDAD) environment is difficult to achieve due to many challenges. Literature has reported that active communication play critical role in enhancing GDAD performance through reducing the cost and time of a project. However, little empirical evidence is known about how to study and establish active communication construct in GDAD in terms of its dimensions, determinants and effects on GDAD performance. To address this knowledge gap, this paper describes an enterprise architecture (EA) driven research model to identify and empirically examine the GDAD active communication construct. This model can be used by researchers and practitioners to examine the relationships among two dimensions of GDAD active communication (effectiveness and efficiency), one antecedent that can be controlled (agile EA), and four dimensions of GDAD performance (on-Time completion, on-budget completion, software functionality and software quality)

A Wheelbarrow Full of Frogs: Understanding Portfolio Management for Agile Projects

Organizations increasingly embrace agile approaches for IT projects, replacing rigid formal stage-gate control by flexible output-orientation. This challenges established program or portfolio management approaches that largely rely on consolidated (stage-gate) project metrics. Based on seven case studies of large Dutch organizations we explore these challenges and the organizational responses towards a new approach to portfolio management for agile projects. Data-collection is guided by four propositions derived from control theory and portfolio management literature. Our findings show that portfolio management adapts to agile projects by performing fewer and less strict process controls, by modifying the budget controls and by shifting from IT project/program control to business outcome control, with an increased focus on business value

Organisational rhetoric and leadership in agile : a Wittgensteinian inquiry.

The focal point of this research has been the unpicking of reported experience versus rhetoric around a neo-bureaucratic approach to project management, referred to as “Agile”. This monolithic entity consists of many distinct methodologies, with an overlapping conceptual core. An understanding of Agile discourse is established through the data analysed as an object of comparison. The research findings speak to the space of legitimated expression and action, the depth grammar, of Agile organisation. The research was undertaken from a perspective of leadership agnosticism, in that the term was sceptically treated and included only in an emic capacity. The research is a coding-based analysis which runs across three strands of linguistic “metafunction”, as defined by Michael Halliday’s “Systemic Functional Grammar”. A total of 35 Agile experience reports were analysed through this process. The codes derived in this first pass were aggregated into groupings based on the perceived relation of events captured, termed manifestations. These manifestations were then themselves aggregated into a smaller set of categories. In practice, this meant a reduction from 138 codes, grouping similar exemplars, to 16 manifestations and then 6 categories. These categories establish the core concepts around which the depth grammar is presented through the first discussion chapter. This research has two primary contributions to Agile and another relating to leadership. In leadership studies, this research stands as an early empirical demonstration of the value in leadership agnosticism. Relating to Agile, a much needed description of the focal points of organisational talk in Agile practice is provided. Furthermore, it is argued that concepts of leadership had a significant role to play in disguising the continued operation of power in Agile contexts. This thesis, then, represents a contribution to Agile literature by providing a fuller exploration of the empirical challenges facing Agile’s idealised “Santa’s workshop” or “Hollywood/Disneyland” template.The focal point of this research has been the unpicking of reported experience versus rhetoric around a neo-bureaucratic approach to project management, referred to as “Agile”. This monolithic entity consists of many distinct methodologies, with an overlapping conceptual core. An understanding of Agile discourse is established through the data analysed as an object of comparison. The research findings speak to the space of legitimated expression and action, the depth grammar, of Agile organisation. The research was undertaken from a perspective of leadership agnosticism, in that the term was sceptically treated and included only in an emic capacity. The research is a coding-based analysis which runs across three strands of linguistic “metafunction”, as defined by Michael Halliday’s “Systemic Functional Grammar”. A total of 35 Agile experience reports were analysed through this process. The codes derived in this first pass were aggregated into groupings based on the perceived relation of events captured, termed manifestations. These manifestations were then themselves aggregated into a smaller set of categories. In practice, this meant a reduction from 138 codes, grouping similar exemplars, to 16 manifestations and then 6 categories. These categories establish the core concepts around which the depth grammar is presented through the first discussion chapter. This research has two primary contributions to Agile and another relating to leadership. In leadership studies, this research stands as an early empirical demonstration of the value in leadership agnosticism. Relating to Agile, a much needed description of the focal points of organisational talk in Agile practice is provided. Furthermore, it is argued that concepts of leadership had a significant role to play in disguising the continued operation of power in Agile contexts. This thesis, then, represents a contribution to Agile literature by providing a fuller exploration of the empirical challenges facing Agile’s idealised “Santa’s workshop” or “Hollywood/Disneyland” template

Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations