Is agile project management applicable to construction?

This paper briefly summarises the evolution of Agile Project Management (APM) and differentiates it from lean and agile production and ‘leagile’ construction. The significant benefits being realized through employment of APM within the information systems industry are stated. The characteristics of APM are explored, including: philosophy, organizational attitudes and practices, planning, execution and control and learning. Finally, APM is subjectively assessed as to its potential contribution to the pre-design, design and construction phases. In conclusion, it is assessed that APM offers considerable potential for application in predesign and design but that there are significant hurdles to its adoption in the actual construction phase. Should these be overcome, APM offers benefits well beyond any individual project

The Antecedents and Consequences of Agile Practices: A Multi-Period Empirical Study of Software Teams in Time-Bound Projects

Through a multi-period study of software teams in time-bound projects, we address the question: In what contexts do agile methods improve systems development performance? Our model includes team network and task characteristics as antecedents and transactive memory system (TMS) as a consequence of the use of agile practices. We further posit that team TMS also moderates the impact of agile practices on project performance. We test the hypothesized model using data collected in three waves from student teams who developed a database system over the course of a semester. Results evince that project performance does not improve through the use of agile practices alone, but does improve when task variability is high and the project team has a high degree of TMS. Results also indicate that the knowledge structure of a software team changes over time and the use of agile practices also directly contributes to the development of TMS within the team

The Relationship between Business Intelligence and Organizational Agility with Emphasis on the Mediating Role of IT Infrastructure Flexibility (Case Study: Active Companies in Rasht Industrial City)

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between business intelligence and organizational agility, emphasizing the mediating role of IT infrastructure flexibility in companies operating in Rasht Industrial City. The current research is a cross-sectional and correlational research, and its statistical population consists of all managers of active companies in Rasht Industrial City, and 255 samples that were selected based on Morgan’s table and by random sampling were used for analysis. Descriptive analyses were performed using SPSS 22 statistical software and final analysis was performed using Smart PLS 2 statistical software. The results of the research showed that business intelligence has a significant relationship with organization agility and IT infrastructure flexibility, and IT infrastructure flexibility has a significant relationship with organization agility. Also, the analysis results confirmed the mediating role of IT infrastructure flexibility in the relationship between business intelligence and organization agility, but the moderating role of IT infrastructure flexibility in the relationship between business intelligence and organization agility was not confirmed. Based on the results of the research, in addition to analysing key information and optimizing strategic decisions, company managers can use business intelligence as a tool to master new technologies for the development and prosperity of IT infrastructures

Agility practices for software development: an investigation of agile organization concepts

In the context of agile software development in New Zealand and Australia, this paper examines the organizational agility related practices with agile software development. The paper looks at agile software development practices in established software development teams and proposes further practices based on organizational agility concepts that can support the agile software development manifesto. With a focus on the organizational agility for agile software development, this study adds to the limited body of research into theories for agile software development. The survey method is used in in conjunction with partial least squares (PLS) method to examine the organizational agility practices that best support agile software development. Based on eight organizational agility concept related practices for agile software development are proposed and validated through this process. Our findings suggest that, knowledge management, organizational culture, organizational learning, competencies, responsiveness, speed, team effort, and workforce agility are vital elements for achieving software development agility

Strategic Agility and Product Development in Emerging Markets : The Role of Employee Resilience and Self-efficacy as Microfoundations

For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) [or other appropriate open licence] licence to any Authors Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submissionPeer reviewedPostprin

Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering

For more than 30 years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people and to provide incentives to make developers satisfied and happy. This claim has rarely been verified in software engineering research, which faces an additional challenge in comparison to more traditional engineering fields: software development is an intellectual activity and is dominated by often-neglected human aspects. Among the skills required for software development, developers must possess high analytical problem-solving skills and creativity for the software construction process. According to psychology research, affects-emotions and moods-deeply influence the cognitive processing abilities and performance of workers, including creativity and analytical problem solving. Nonetheless, little research has investigated the correlation between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving performance of programmers. This article echoes the call to employ psychological measurements in software engineering research. We report a study with 42 participants to investigate the relationship between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving skills of software developers. The results offer support for the claim that happy developers are indeed better problem solvers in terms of their analytical abilities. The following contributions are made by this study: (1) providing a better understanding of the impact of affective states on the creativity and analytical problem-solving capacities of developers, (2) introducing and validating psychological measurements, theories, and concepts of affective states, creativity, and analytical-problem-solving skills in empirical software engineering, and (3) raising the need for studying the human factors of software engineering by employing a multidisciplinary viewpoint.Comment: 33 pages, 11 figures, published at Peer

The Empire Strikes Back: The end of Agile as we know it?

Agile methods have co-evolved with the onset of rapid change in software and systems development and the methodologies and process models designed to guide them. Conceived from the lessons of practice, Agile methods brought a balanced perspective between the intentions of the stakeholder, the management function, and developers. As an evolutionary progression, trends towards rapid continuous delivery have witnessed the advent of DevOps where advances in tooling, technologies, and the environment of both development and consumption exert a new dynamic into the Agile oeuvre. We investigate the progression from Agile to DevOps from a Critical Social Theoretic perspective to examine a paradox in agility – does an always-on conceptualization of production forestall and impinge upon the processes of reflection and renewal that are also endemic to Agile methods? This paper is offered as a catalyst for critical examination of and as a call to action to advocate for sustaining and nurturing reflective practice in Agile and post-Agile methods, such as DevOps. Under threat of disenfranchisement and relegation to automation, we question how evolution towards DevOps may alter key elements in the tenets and principles of the Agile methods phenomenon

UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIO-TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF LOW-CODE ADOPTION FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

The digital transformation of organizations’ leverages several approaches for creating software applications that meet the requirements of the specific context. Besides well-researched approaches like software development, outsourcing, or customizing commercial software packages, low-code platforms today offer a new approach for creating software. The low-code approach allows to develop software without or with limited actual coding, but by combining executable software components into workflows. While the low-code approach simplifies software development and offers a reduction in effort and time, we lack explanations on why organizations adopt it, and which challenges are associated with this adoption. We, therefore, investigate the adoption of the low-code approach based on the technology-organization-environment framework. We identified ten aspects supporting and six aspects hindering the adoption of the low-code approach. For practice, we propose a model that can assist organizations in determining the adequacy for adopting the low-code approach

Understanding Agile Software Development Assimilation Beyond Acceptance

Agile software development methods represent a departure from the heavily regimented and document-driven procedures of traditional, waterfall approaches. Despite the highly touted benefits of employing agile ISD methods and the growth of agile adoption rates over the past two decades, it is not clear why some organizations fail to routinize agile methods, while others do so and realize their promised benefits. Motivated by the need to understand the factors that influence agile routinization, this study empirically examines the deep contextual factors that impact the extent to which agile methods are proliferated throughout an organization. Findings indicate that project success from initial agile use does not translate to routine agile use. Instead, findings from the study suggest that organizational factors of organizational culture and structure play a pivotal role in the routinization of agile methods

KM-SORE: Knowledge Management for Service Oriented Requirements Engineering

Service-oriented Software Engineering is a new style for creating software using reusable services which are available over the web. The biggest challenge in this process is to discover and select the appropriate services that match system requirements. Currently, none of the proposed approach has been accepted by research community as a standard. There is very little empirical work available that addresses requirements engineering in service oriented paradigm. The aim of this study is to propose a framework for requirements engineering in SOSE. The framework is based on a new idea, that integrating Knowledge Management in Service Oriented development would improve requirement engineering phase as it does for traditional software engineering. The framework is developed in the light of the issues and challenges identified by published literature and the feedback of practitioners and researchers working on service oriented projects