Influences on agile practice tailoring in enterprise software development.

Agile development projects have become a reality in large enterprises using offshore development models. A case study involving seven international companies with offices in Bangalore, India, and London, UK was conducted, including interviews with 19 practitioners. The contribution of this paper is to illustrate the reasons for tailoring Agile practices within the context of large enterprises. The findings show that scrum roles and practices did not conflict with enterprise policies or processes and were thought to improve product quality and productivity. However, agile practices from the XP tradition were not so widely adopted. Test driven development did not integrate well within enterprises where independent quality assurance teams were constituted as separate departments. Continuous integration was found to be challenging where enterprise software products required time consuming regression testing and elaborate code release processes. While adoption of coding standards and collective code ownership are necessary to facilitate interaction between disparate stakeholder groups

Knowledge Partitioning in Outsourced Software Development: A Field Study

The outsourced software development process has traditionally relied on a requirements-driven black-box approach for transferring knowledge of customer needs to vendors. When this approach is feasible, the need for the customer and the vendor to deeply understand each others’ knowledge domain is limited. We describe this as symmetric division of knowledge. However, asymmetric overlaps in knowledge are necessary at the vendor-customer boundary in projects involving conceptual or process newness. In this study, we examine the conditions under which overlaps in knowledge at the vendor-customer boundary are necessary for enhancing the development process in outsourcing relationships. We develop and test a model using data collected in a large-scale field study of 209 software projects in 209 software development organizations belonging to three of the largest global software consortia. The study makes three contributions: (1) we empirically demonstrate that it is more important for a vendor to possess a higher level of business knowledge in conceptually new projects and for the customer to have a higher level of technical knowledge when the project involves process newness, (2) we assess the effectiveness of various integrating mechanisms, and (3) we show that there are potential downsides to blindly increasing vendor-customer overlaps in knowledge beyond those that have traditionally characterized software development

Which research in design creativity and innovation? Let us not forget the reality of companies

Studying design creativity and innovation from practical perspectives for companies requires both a good understanding of the company ecosystem and its inner processes contributing to delivered innovations and a rigorous design research methodology to provide effective design models, methods, platforms that are truly effective in the context of company. Working in an Industrial Engineering laboratory, we advocate a more systemic vision of design creativity and innovation in company ecosystems. We present in this paper an attempt to develop and make professional an innovation engineering. Our research works are illustrated along the different research topics of an innovation process. We start by a recent survey on innovation practice and organizational models led in 28 large companies. The lessons learned about this survey reinforce our belief that there is a need for a new method in agile management of radical innovation projects in company contexts. We currently develop, test and apply such a methodology named: Radical Innovation Design(RID). Its effectiveness has been evaluated through a large scale evaluation of the project outcomes for the company. Two extensions of RID have been proposed and deployed in company contexts: a selection procedure for innovation clusters and a value-driven process for airplane development projects

Industry-driven innovative system development for the construction industry: The DIVERCITY project

Collaborative working has become possible using the innovative integrated systems in construction as many activities are performed globally with stakeholders situated in various locations. The Integrated VR based information systems can bind the fragmentation and provide communication and collaboration between the distributed stakeholders n various locations. The development of these technologies is vital for the uptake of these systems by the construction industry. This paper starts by emphasising the importance of construction IT research and reviews some future research directions in this area. In particular, the paper explores how virtual prototyping can improve the productivity and effectiveness of construction projects, and presents DIVERCITY, which is th as a case study of the research in virtual prototyping. Besides, the paper explores the requirements engineering of the DIVERCITY project. DIVERCITY has large and evolving requirements, which considered the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, such as clients, architects and contractors. However, practitioners are often unsure of the detail of how virtual environments would support the construction process, and how to overcome some barriers to the introduction of new technologies. This complicates the requirements engineering process

Catching up with Method and Process Practice: An Industry-Informed Baseline for Researchers

Software development methods are usually not applied by the book.companies are under pressure to continuously deploy software products that meet market needs and stakeholders\u27 requests. To implement efficient and effective development processes, companies utilize multiple frameworks, methods and practices, and combine these into hybrid methods. A common combination contains a rich management framework to organize and steer projects complemented with a number of smaller practices providing the development teams with tools to complete their tasks. In this paper, based on 732 data points collected through an international survey, we study the software development process use in practice. Our results show that 76.8% of the companies implement hybrid methods.company size as well as the strategy in devising and evolving hybrid methods affect the suitability of the chosen process to reach company or project goals. Our findings show that companies that combine planned improvement programs with process evolution can increase their process\u27 suitability by up to 5%

A fourfold typology of living labs: an empirical investigation amongst the ENoLL community

Living Labs can be seen as a means to structure user involvement in innovation processes. However, in this rather young research domain, there is no consensus yet regarding supporting theories and frameworks. This has resulted in a wide variety of projects and approaches being called ‘Living Labs’, which leaves a clear conceptualization and definition a task in progress. Within this research paper we propose a fourfold categorization of Living Labs based on a literature review and validated by an empirical investigation of the characteristics of 64 ICT Living Labs from the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL). The four types are Living Labs for collaboration and knowledge support activities, original ‘American’ Living Labs, Living Labs as extension to testbeds and Living Labs that support context research and co-creation with users