Redefining the Role of Testers in Organisational Transition to Agile Methodologies

Many challenges confront companies when they change their current software development process to an agile development methodology. Those challenges could be rather difficult but one that requires considerable attention is the integration of testing with development. This is because in heavyweight processes, as in the traditional waterfall approach, testing is a phase often conducted by testers as part of a quality assurance team towards the end of the development cycle whereas in the agile methodology testing is part of a continuous development activity with no specific “tester” role defined. In this paper we consider several options for testers when an organisation transit to agile methodology, and propose a new project mentor role for them. This role aims to utilize the knowledge that testers already have in both the business domain and the development technology together with their expertise in quality practices. This role will enhance the stature of testers as well as enable the company to effectively deploy the testers in the new environment. Motivations and benefits for this role are presented in this paper together with our plan for evaluation of this proposal

Agile methodologies in times of pandemic : acquisition of employment skills in higher education

Purpose ¿ This research aims to focus on analysing the opinion of university students on the effects that agile methodologies are having on their education during this time of pandemic that is affecting the normal functioning of on-site universities. Specifically, the authors intend to analyse the effect that different constructs have on the development of their skills for labour markets through the application of agile methodologies in blended learning. Thus, the authors will analyse the effects of intrinsic motivation, the interactivity of the system, the involvement of students, their engagement to these activities and their level of satisfaction with this training process. Design/methodology/approach ¿ The authors conducted research based on the use of agile methodologies applied to higher education. To this end, various activities were designed within different subjects in marketing area. 115 business students were consulted, who valued their experience and the usefulness of this methodology in relation to the improvement of the learning process. Findings ¿ The results of the research show the usefulness of agile methodologies for university students. In addition, these methodologies allow them to develop certain skills that will be important for labour markets, such as teamwork, motivation and engagement to tasks to be developed. Originality/value ¿The main value of this research lies in the application of a methodology from the business environment in higher education and the subsequent analysis of the students¿ assessment of these agile methodologies in terms of their usefulness for their professional future. Moreover, this application of agile methodologies has been carried out in an unusual environment due to the pandemic situation that has changed the usual development of face-to-face university training towards the application of e-learning methodologies

Implementing an agile start-up culture into a process oriented company

The purpose of the present study was to find out and implement more agile ways of working into a process oriented telecommunications company TeliaSonera Finland Oyj. TeliaSonera Finland is one of the largest telecommunication companies in Finland and the largest in the Nordics. In Finland it operates under the name of Sonera Oyj. Part of TeliaSonera’s strategy is to become a new generation telecommunications company through transforming the company towards more application and integrator type of service provider and finding new business opportunities close to the core business. During the study, a current state analysis was made from Sonera’s current development methodology and decision-making processes. Three different disciplines were selected to be studied that were lean start-up and lean service creation, scaled agile framework and bimodal enterprise. A lean service creation program was launched in order to validate these methodologies with a case study with one of the new business initiatives close to the core – eHealth. The results revealed many different angles for the company to further develop: customer centricity, agility in development governance and culture. The scope of the development projects were not usually based on engaging the customer into the design process and projects tended to grow very large with big scopes and long lead times in the current state analysis. The minimum viable product thinking was something that the company was not used to do. The entrepreneurship culture was after all discovered to be one of the largest challenge for the company. There is no “one size fits all” type of approach. Instead, the conceptual framework should be adjustable and different methodologies suit better in different type of development items based on size, complexity, business area and so on. The author recommends that the leaders in Sonera make sure that the lean service creation and agile methodologies are taken more widely into use throughout the organization, but also clarify the guidelines of different disciplines. The change from a tightly-governed company to an agile start-up-like company with entrepreneurship as its core value does not happen overnight, it requires a lot of change management and continuous learning – especially from the management

Project Success in Agile Development Projects

The paper explains and clarifies the differences between Waterfall and Agile development methodologies, establishes what criteria could be taken into account to properly define project success within the scope of software development projects, and finally tries to clarify if project success is the reason why many organizations are moving to Agile methodologies from other ones such as Waterfall. In the form of a literature review, it analyses several, publications, investigations and case studies that point out the motives why companies moved to Agile, as well as the results they observed afterward. It also analyses overall statistics of project outcomes after companies evolved from traditional methodologies such as Waterfall to Agile development approaches

Towards Guidelines for Preventing Critical Requirements Engineering Problems

Context] Problems in Requirements Engineering (RE) can lead to serious consequences during the software development lifecycle. [Goal] The goal of this paper is to propose empirically-based guidelines that can be used by different types of organisations according to their size (small, medium or large) and process model (agile or plan-driven) to help them in preventing such problems. [Method] We analysed data from a survey on RE problems answered by 228 organisations in 10 different countries. [Results] We identified the most critical RE problems, their causes and mitigation actions, organizing this information by clusters of size and process model. Finally, we analysed the causes and mitigation actions of the critical problems of each cluster to get further insights into how to prevent them. [Conclusions] Based on our results, we suggest preliminary guidelines for preventing critical RE problems in response to context characteristics of the companies.Comment: Proceedings of the 42th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, 201

Incorporating Agile with MDA Case Study: Online Polling System

Nowadays agile software development is used in greater extend but for small organizations only, whereas MDA is suitable for large organizations but yet not standardized. In this paper the pros and cons of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Extreme programming have been discussed. As both of them have some limitations and cannot be used in both large scale and small scale organizations a new architecture has been proposed. In this model it is tried to opt the advantages and important values to overcome the limitations of both the software development procedures. In support to the proposed architecture the implementation of it on Online Polling System has been discussed and all the phases of software development have been explained.Comment: 14 pages,1 Figure,1 Tabl