Non-Technical Individual Skills are Weakly Connected to the Maturity of Agile Practices

Context: Existing knowledge in agile software development suggests that individual competency (e.g. skills) is a critical success factor for agile projects. While assuming that technical skills are important for every kind of software development project, many researchers suggest that non-technical individual skills are especially important in agile software development. Objective: In this paper, we investigate whether non-technical individual skills can predict the use of agile practices. Method: Through creating a set of multiple linear regression models using a total of 113 participants from agile teams in six software development organizations from The Netherlands and Brazil, we analyzed the predictive power of non-technical individual skills in relation to agile practices. Results: The results show that there is surprisingly low power in using non-technical individual skills to predict (i.e. explain variance in) the mature use of agile practices in software development. Conclusions: Therefore, we conclude that looking at non-technical individual skills is not the optimal level of analysis when trying to understand, and explain, the mature use of agile practices in the software development context. We argue that it is more important to focus on the non-technical skills as a team-level capacity instead of assuring that all individuals possess such skills when understanding the use of the agile practices.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur

The Unfulfilled Potential of Data-Driven Decision Making in Agile Software Development

With the general trend towards data-driven decision making (DDDM), organizations are looking for ways to use DDDM to improve their decisions. However, few studies have looked into the practitioners view of DDDM, in particular for agile organizations. In this paper we investigated the experiences of using DDDM, and how data can improve decision making. An emailed questionnaire was sent out to 124 industry practitioners in agile software developing companies, of which 84 answered. The results show that few practitioners indicated a widespread use of DDDM in their current decision making practices. The practitioners were more positive to its future use for higher-level and more general decision making, fairly positive to its use for requirements elicitation and prioritization decisions, while being less positive to its future use at the team level. The practitioners do see a lot of potential for DDDM in an agile context; however, currently unfulfilled

Agile Development and User-Centered Design - a case study at Sony Mobile Communications AB

Syftet med detta examensarbete var att undersöka hur agil utveckling och användarcentrerad design kan kombineras i en utvecklingsprocess. Undersökningen baseras sig på den utvecklingsprocess med Scrum som används på en sektion vid avdelningen Applikationer och Service på Sony Mobile Communications AB i Lund, Sverige. Det första målet med examensarbetet var att förse sektionen med ett antal förslag på hur de kan förbättra sin utvecklingsprocess för att ytterligare kombinera agil utveckling och användarcentrerad design. Eftersom sektionen nyligen har startat ett projekt angående användbarhetstester med LTH (Lunds Tekniska Högskola) och kombinerar detta med deras utvecklingsprocess, var det angeläget att undersöka om det ger någon nytta tillbaka till utvecklingsprocessen. Därför var detta det andra målet med examensarbetet. För att kunna uppnå syftet och målen med examensarbetet genomfördes en casestudie där den nuvarande utvecklingsprocessen undersöktes, evaluerades och analyserades. Den metod som användes i studien var etnografisk och teammedlemmarna i utvecklingsteamen på sektionen användes som referensmaterial. För att undersöka användbarhetstesterna användes både teammedlemmarna och de testpersoner som deltog i testerna som referensmaterial. Resultatet av studien visar att användbarhetstesterna som utförs på sektionen ger något tillbaka och speciellt i ökad medvetenhet gällande användarupplevelsefrågor och användbarhetsfrågor. Denna medvetenhetsökning berör speciellt utvecklarna och produktägarna. När det kommer till undersökningen, evalueringen och analysen av den nuvarande utvecklingsprocess som används på sektionen resulterade det i fem stycken rekommendationer av hur processen ytterligare kan ta hänsyn till användarcentrerad design. Det sammanlagda utlåtandet av rekommendationerna är att den nuvarande processen måste i ett tidigare skedde kombinera användarcentrerad design genom att använda sig av fler användbarhetsmetoder och slutanvändare.The main purpose of this master´s thesis was to investigate how agile development and user-centered design can be combined in a development process. The target development process for this investigation was a development process at a section in the department Application and Service at Sony Mobile Communications AB in Lund, Sweden. The first goal of the thesis was to provide the section with a set of recommendations, concerning how they further can combine agile development and user-centered design in their development process. Furthermore, the section had started a pilot project concerning usability testing with LTH (The Faculty of Engineering at Lund University), and therefore it was interesting to know whether this gives something back in return on investment to the development process. Consequently, this was the second goal of the thesis. In order to fulfill the purpose and goals of the thesis a case study was performed. The performance resulted in an examination, evaluation and analysis regarding the current development process. The method used in the case study was ethnographical and the development teams at the section were used as reference material. Moreover, to be able to investigate the potential return on investment for the usability tests both development teams and test persons attending the test sessions were used as reference material. The result of the case study revealed a return on investment for the started usability tests and this investment the development teams most benefits from. The benefit of the development teams, especially the developers and product owners, is the increase of awareness towards user experience questions and usability questions. Furthermore, the examination, evaluation and analysis of the current development process resulted in five recommendations of how the development process at the section further can combine agile development and user-centered design. The outcome of these recommendations is that the current development process needs to combine user-centered design by more involvement of usability evaluation methods and end-users at an earlier stage

Creating business value from big data and business analytics : organizational, managerial and human resource implications

This paper reports on a research project, funded by the EPSRC’s NEMODE (New Economic Models in the Digital Economy, Network+) programme, explores how organizations create value from their increasingly Big Data and the challenges they face in doing so. Three case studies are reported of large organizations with a formal business analytics group and data volumes that can be considered to be ‘big’. The case organizations are MobCo, a mobile telecoms operator, MediaCo, a television broadcaster, and CityTrans, a provider of transport services to a major city. Analysis of the cases is structured around a framework in which data and value creation are mediated by the organization’s business analytics capability. This capability is then studied through a sociotechnical lens of organization/management, process, people, and technology. From the cases twenty key findings are identified. In the area of data and value creation these are: 1. Ensure data quality, 2. Build trust and permissions platforms, 3. Provide adequate anonymization, 4. Share value with data originators, 5. Create value through data partnerships, 6. Create public as well as private value, 7. Monitor and plan for changes in legislation and regulation. In organization and management: 8. Build a corporate analytics strategy, 9. Plan for organizational and cultural change, 10. Build deep domain knowledge, 11. Structure the analytics team carefully, 12. Partner with academic institutions, 13. Create an ethics approval process, 14. Make analytics projects agile, 15. Explore and exploit in analytics projects. In technology: 16. Use visualization as story-telling, 17. Be agnostic about technology while the landscape is uncertain (i.e., maintain a focus on value). In people and tools: 18. Data scientist personal attributes (curious, problem focused), 19. Data scientist as ‘bricoleur’, 20. Data scientist acquisition and retention through challenging work. With regards to what organizations should do if they want to create value from their data the paper further proposes: a model of the analytics eco-system that places the business analytics function in a broad organizational context; and a process model for analytics implementation together with a six-stage maturity model