What influences the speed of prototyping? An empirical investigation of twenty software startups

It is essential for startups to quickly experiment business ideas by building tangible prototypes and collecting user feedback on them. As prototyping is an inevitable part of learning for early stage software startups, how fast startups can learn depends on how fast they can prototype. Despite of the importance, there is a lack of research about prototyping in software startups. In this study, we aimed at understanding what are factors influencing different types of prototyping activities. We conducted a multiple case study on twenty European software startups. The results are two folds, firstly we propose a prototype-centric learning model in early stage software startups. Secondly, we identify factors occur as barriers but also facilitators for prototyping in early stage software startups. The factors are grouped into (1) artifacts, (2) team competence, (3) collaboration, (4) customer and (5) process dimensions. To speed up a startups progress at the early stage, it is important to incorporate the learning objective into a well-defined collaborative approach of prototypingComment: This is the author's version of the work. Copyright owner's version can be accessed at doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57633-6_2, XP2017, Cologne, German

Beyond Surveys: Analyzing Software Development Artifacts to Assess Teaching Efforts

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach of using software development artifacts to gauge student behavior and the effectiveness of changes to curriculum design. There is an ongoing need to adapt university courses to changing requirements and shifts in industry. As an educator it is therefore vital to have access to methods, with which to ascertain the effects of curriculum design changes. In this paper, we present our approach of analyzing software repositories in order to gauge student behavior during project work. We evaluate this approach in a case study of a university undergraduate software development course teaching agile development methodologies. Surveys revealed positive attitudes towards the course and the change of employed development methodology from Scrum to Kanban. However, surveys were not usable to ascertain the degree to which students had adapted their workflows and whether they had done so in accordance with course goals. Therefore, we analyzed students' software repository data, which represents information that can be collected by educators to reveal insights into learning successes and detailed student behavior. We analyze the software repositories created during the last five courses, and evaluate differences in workflows between Kanban and Scrum usage

A Research Agenda for Studying Open Source I: A Multi-Level Framework

This paper presents a research agenda for studying information systems using open source software A multi-level research model is developed at five discrete levels of analysis: (1) the artifact; (2) the individual; (3) the team, project, and community; (4) the organization; and (5) society. Each level is discussed in terms of key issues within the level. Examples are based on prior research. In a companion paper, [Niederman, et al 2006], we view the agenda through the lens of referent discipline theories

Scrum2Kanban: Integrating Kanban and Scrum in a University Software Engineering Capstone Course

Using university capstone courses to teach agile software development methodologies has become commonplace, as agile methods have gained support in professional software development. This usually means students are introduced to and work with the currently most popular agile methodology: Scrum. However, as the agile methods employed in the industry change and are adapted to different contexts, university courses must follow suit. A prime example of this is the Kanban method, which has recently gathered attention in the industry. In this paper, we describe a capstone course design, which adds the hands-on learning of the lean principles advocated by Kanban into a capstone project run with Scrum. This both ensures that students are aware of recent process frameworks and ideas as well as gain a more thorough overview of how agile methods can be employed in practice. We describe the details of the course and analyze the participating students' perceptions as well as our observations. We analyze the development artifacts, created by students during the course in respect to the two different development methodologies. We further present a summary of the lessons learned as well as recommendations for future similar courses. The survey conducted at the end of the course revealed an overwhelmingly positive attitude of students towards the integration of Kanban into the course

Project Quality of Offshore Virtual Teams Engaged in Software Requirements Analysis: An Exploratory Comparative Study

The off-shore software development companies in countries such as India use a global delivery model in which initial requirement analysis phase of software projects get executed at client locations to leverage frequent and deep interaction between user and developer teams. Subsequent phases such as design, coding and testing are completed at off-shore locations. Emerging trends indicate an increasing interest in off-shoring even requirements analysis phase using computer mediated communication. We conducted an exploratory research study involving students from Management Development Institute (MDI), India and Marquette University (MU), USA to determine quality of such off-shored requirements analysis projects. Our findings suggest that project quality of teams engaged in pure off-shore mode is comparable to that of teams engaged in collocated mode. However, the effect of controls such as user project monitoring on the quality of off-shored projects needs to be studied further