Agile Process Consultation -- An Applied Psychology Approach to Agility

An agile change effort in an organization needs to be understood in relation to human processes. Such theory and accompanying tools already existed almost 50 years ago in applied psychology. The core ideas of Agile Process Consultation are that a client initiating a change toward more agility often does not know what is wrong and the consultant needs to diagnose the problem jointly with the client. It is also assumed that the agile consultant cannot know the organizational culture of the client's organization, which means that the client needs to be making the decisions based on the suggestions provided by the consultant. Since agile project management is spreading across the enterprise and outside of software development, we need situational approaches instead of prescribing low-level practices.Comment: Proceedings on the 24th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), 201

Enterprise Agility: Why Is Transformation so Hard?

Enterprise agility requires capabilities to transform, sense and seize new business opportunities more quickly than competitors. However, acquiring those capabilities, such as continuous delivery and scaling agility to product programmes, portfolios and business models, is challenging in many organisations. This paper introduces definitions of enterprise agility involving business management and cultural lenses for analysing large-scale agile transformation. The case organisation, in the higher education domain, leverages collaborative discovery sprints and an experimental programme to enable a bottom-up approach to transformation. Meanwhile the prevalence of bureaucracy and organisational silos are often contradictory to agile principles and values. The case study results identify transformation challenges based on observations from a five-month research period. Initial findings indicate that increased focus on organisational culture and leveraging of both bottom-up innovation and supportive top-down leadership activities, could enhance the likelihood of a successful transformation

The Systems Approach to Change and the Agile Software Development Context

There is a diversity of models explaining organizational culture and how these complex aspects can be addressed in connection to organizational change efforts. This workshop paper claims that models already exist for dealing with the cultural change that an agile transition is in the software engineering context. Instead of realizing this again through agile success stories, and thus reinventing the wheel, it is argued that the research in the software engineering field should build on these models instead and investigate how/if they differ. Practitioners already work as the change agents described in other fields and they should get recognition through the presence and integration of these models in the software engineering process research

Embedding Requirements within the Model Driven Architecture

The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) brings benefits to software development, among them the potential for connecting software models with the business domain. This paper focuses on the upstream or Computation Independent Model (CIM) phase of the MDA. Our contention is that, whilst there are many models and notations available within the CIM Phase, those that are currently popular and supported by the Object Management Group (OMG), may not be the most useful notations for business analysts nor sufficient to fully support software requirements and specification. Therefore, with specific emphasis on the value of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) for business analysts, this paper provides an example of a typical CIM approach before describing an approach which incorporates specific requirements techniques. A framework extension to the MDA is then introduced; which embeds requirements and specification within the CIM, thus further enhancing the utility of MDA by providing a more complete method for business analysis

Addressing the Quality and Safety Gap Part I: Case Studies in Transforming Hospital Nursing and Building Cultures of Safety

Presents case studies of strategies four healthcare systems and a state government are using to address underlying causes in flawed systems: strengthening care processes, optimizing staffing, and promoting safe work habits. Lists policy recommendations

What is the Connection Between Issues, Bugs, and Enhancements? (Lessons Learned from 800+ Software Projects)

Agile teams juggle multiple tasks so professionals are often assigned to multiple projects, especially in service organizations that monitor and maintain a large suite of software for a large user base. If we could predict changes in project conditions changes, then managers could better adjust the staff allocated to those projects.This paper builds such a predictor using data from 832 open source and proprietary applications. Using a time series analysis of the last 4 months of issues, we can forecast how many bug reports and enhancement requests will be generated next month. The forecasts made in this way only require a frequency count of this issue reports (and do not require an historical record of bugs found in the project). That is, this kind of predictive model is very easy to deploy within a project. We hence strongly recommend this method for forecasting future issues, enhancements, and bugs in a project.Comment: Accepted to 2018 International Conference on Software Engineering, at the software engineering in practice track. 10 pages, 10 figure

DevOps in Practice -- A preliminary Analysis of two Multinational Companies

DevOps is a cultural movement that aims the collaboration of all the stakeholders involved in the development, deployment and operation of soft-ware to deliver a quality product or service in the shortest possible time. DevOps is relatively recent, and companies have developed their DevOps prac-tices largely from scratch. Our research aims to conduct an analysis on practic-ing DevOps in +20 software-intensive companies to provide patterns of DevOps practices and identify their benefits and barriers. This paper presents the preliminary analysis of an exploratory case study based on the interviews to relevant stakeholders of two (multinational) companies. The results show the benefits (software delivery performance) and barriers that these companies are dealing with, as well as DevOps team topology they approached during their DevOps transformation. This study aims to help practitioners and researchers to better understand DevOps transformations and the contexts where the practices worked. This, hopefully, will contribute to strengthening the evidence regarding DevOps and supporting practitioners in making better informed decisions about the return of investment when adopting DevOps.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, conferenc

Software Engineers' Attitudes Towards Organizational Change - an Industrial Case Study

In order to cope with a complex and changing environment, industries seek to find new and more efficient ways to conduct their business. According to previous research, many of these change efforts fail to achieve their intended aims. Researchers have therefore sought to identify factors that increase the likelihood of success and found that employees' attitude towards change is one of the most critical. The ability to manage change is especially important in software engineering organizations, where rapid changes in influential technologies and constantly evolving methodologies create a turbulent environment. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no studies exist that explore attitude towards change in a software engineering organization. In this case study, we have used industry data to examine if the knowledge about the intended change outcome, the understanding of the need for change, and the feelings of participation affect software engineers' openness to change and readiness for change respectively, two commonly used attitude constructs. The result of two separate multiple regression analysis showed that openness to change is predicted by all three concepts, while readiness for change is predicted by need for change and participation. In addition, our research also provides a hierarchy with respect to the three predictive constructs' degree of impact. Ultimately, our result can help managers in software engineering organizations to increase the likelihood of successfully implementing change initiatives that result in a changed organizational behavior. However, the first-order models we propose are to be recognized as early approximations that captures the most significant effects and should therefore, in future research, be extended to include additional software engineering unique factors

Agile in the Era of Digitalization : A Finnish Survey Study

This paper was a Candidate for the Best Full Paper.Peer reviewe

Enterprise agility: A Balancing Act - a local government case study

Austerity and financial constraints have been threatening the public sector in the UK for a number of years. Foreseeing the threat of continued budget cuts, and addressing the situation many local councils face, requires internal transformations for financial stability without losing the key focus on public service. Agile transformations have been undertaken by organisations wanting to learn from the software development community and bringing agile principles into the wider organisation. This paper describes and analyses an ongoing behaviour-led transformation in a district council in the UK. It presents the results of the analysis of 19 interviews with internal stakeholders at the council, of observations of meetings among senior and middle management in a five-month period. The paper explores the successes and the challenges encountered towards the end of the transformation process and reflects on balancing acts to address the challenges, be-tween: disruption and business as usual, empowerment and goal setting, autonomy and processes and procedures, and behaviours and skills. Based on our findings, we suggest that behaviours on their own cannot guarantee a sustained agile culture, and that this is equally important for enterprise agility and for large-scale agile software development transformations