The mystery of the writing that isn’t on the wall: differences in public representations in traditional and agile software development

This paper considers the use of public displays, such as whiteboards and papers pinned to walls, by different software development teams, based on evidence from a number of empirical studies. This paper outlines differences in use observed between traditional and agile teams and begins to identify the implications that they may have for software development

Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering

For more than 30 years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people and to provide incentives to make developers satisfied and happy. This claim has rarely been verified in software engineering research, which faces an additional challenge in comparison to more traditional engineering fields: software development is an intellectual activity and is dominated by often-neglected human aspects. Among the skills required for software development, developers must possess high analytical problem-solving skills and creativity for the software construction process. According to psychology research, affects-emotions and moods-deeply influence the cognitive processing abilities and performance of workers, including creativity and analytical problem solving. Nonetheless, little research has investigated the correlation between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving performance of programmers. This article echoes the call to employ psychological measurements in software engineering research. We report a study with 42 participants to investigate the relationship between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving skills of software developers. The results offer support for the claim that happy developers are indeed better problem solvers in terms of their analytical abilities. The following contributions are made by this study: (1) providing a better understanding of the impact of affective states on the creativity and analytical problem-solving capacities of developers, (2) introducing and validating psychological measurements, theories, and concepts of affective states, creativity, and analytical-problem-solving skills in empirical software engineering, and (3) raising the need for studying the human factors of software engineering by employing a multidisciplinary viewpoint.Comment: 33 pages, 11 figures, published at Peer

Pair programming and the re-appropriation of individual tools for collaborative software development

Although pair programming is becoming more prevalent in software development, and a number of reports have been written about it [10] [13], few have addressed the manner in which pairing actually takes place [12]. Even fewer consider the methods used to manage issues such as role change or the communication of complex issues. This paper highlights the way resources designed for individuals are re-appropriated and augmented by pair programmers to facilitate collaboration. It also illustrates that pair verbalisations can augment the benefits of the collocated team, providing examples from ethnographic studies of pair programmers 'in the wild'

The Dynamics of Creativity in Software Development

Software is primarily developed for people by people and human factors must be studied in all software engineering phases. Creativity is the source to improvise solutions to problems for dominating complex systems such as software development. However, there is a lack of knowledge in what creativity is in software development and what its dynamics are. This study describes the current state of the research plan towards a theory on creativity in software development. More specifically, it (1) states the motivation for studying creativity in software development under a multidisciplinary view; it (2) provides a first review of the literature identifying the shortcomings in the field; it (3) proposes a research design, which includes rarely employed methods in software engineering. To understand creativity in software development will provide a better knowledge of the software construction process and how individuals intellectually contribute to the creation of better, innovative products.Comment: 6 Pages. To be presented in the 14th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2013) - Doctoral Symposium, 12 June 2013, Paphos, Cyprus. This is the final, accepted version (after peer review

Coordinating Knowledge Work in Multi-Team Programs: Findings from a Large-Scale Agile Development Program

Software development projects have undergone remarkable changes with the arrival of agile development methods. While intended for small, self-managing teams, these methods are increasingly used also for large development programs. A major challenge in programs is to coordinate the work of many teams, due to high uncertainty in tasks, a high degree of interdependence between tasks and because of the large number of people involved. This revelatory case study focuses on how knowledge work is coordinated in large-scale agile development programs by providing a rich description of the coordination practices used and how these practices change over time in a four year development program with 12 development teams. The main findings highlight the role of coordination modes based on feedback, the use of a number of mechanisms far beyond what is described in practitioner advice, and finally how coordination practices change over time. The findings are important to improve the outcome of large knowledge-based development programs by tailoring coordination practices to needs and ensuring adjustment over time.Comment: To appear in Project Management Journa

Rationale in Development Chat Messages: An Exploratory Study

Chat messages of development teams play an increasingly significant role in software development, having replaced emails in some cases. Chat messages contain information about discussed issues, considered alternatives and argumentation leading to the decisions made during software development. These elements, defined as rationale, are invaluable during software evolution for documenting and reusing development knowledge. Rationale is also essential for coping with changes and for effective maintenance of the software system. However, exploiting the rationale hidden in the chat messages is challenging due to the high volume of unstructured messages covering a wide range of topics. This work presents the results of an exploratory study examining the frequency of rationale in chat messages, the completeness of the available rationale and the potential of automatic techniques for rationale extraction. For this purpose, we apply content analysis and machine learning techniques on more than 8,700 chat messages from three software development projects. Our results show that chat messages are a rich source of rationale and that machine learning is a promising technique for detecting rationale and identifying different rationale elements.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. The 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'17

Boundary Objects and their Use in Agile Systems Engineering

Agile methods are increasingly introduced in automotive companies in the attempt to become more efficient and flexible in the system development. The adoption of agile practices influences communication between stakeholders, but also makes companies rethink the management of artifacts and documentation like requirements, safety compliance documents, and architecture models. Practitioners aim to reduce irrelevant documentation, but face a lack of guidance to determine what artifacts are needed and how they should be managed. This paper presents artifacts, challenges, guidelines, and practices for the continuous management of systems engineering artifacts in automotive based on a theoretical and empirical understanding of the topic. In collaboration with 53 practitioners from six automotive companies, we conducted a design-science study involving interviews, a questionnaire, focus groups, and practical data analysis of a systems engineering tool. The guidelines suggest the distinction between artifacts that are shared among different actors in a company (boundary objects) and those that are used within a team (locally relevant artifacts). We propose an analysis approach to identify boundary objects and three practices to manage systems engineering artifacts in industry

“Computing” Requirements for Open Source Software: A Distributed Cognitive Approach

Most requirements engineering (RE) research has been conducted in the context of structured and agile software development. Software, however, is increasingly developed in open source software (OSS) forms which have several unique characteristics. In this study, we approach OSS RE as a sociotechnical, distributed cognitive process where distributed actors “compute” requirements—i.e., transform requirements-related knowledge into forms that foster a shared understanding of what the software is going to do and how it can be implemented. Such computation takes place through social sharing of knowledge and the use of heterogeneous artifacts. To illustrate the value of this approach, we conduct a case study of a popular OSS project, Rubinius—a runtime environment for the Ruby programming language—and identify ways in which cognitive workload associated with RE becomes distributed socially, structurally, and temporally across actors and artifacts. We generalize our observations into an analytic framework of OSS RE, which delineates three stages of requirements computation: excavation, instantiation, and testing-in-the-wild. We show how the distributed, dynamic, and heterogeneous computational structure underlying OSS development builds an effective mechanism for managing requirements. Our study contributes to sorely needed theorizing of appropriate RE processes within highly distributed environments as it identifies and articulates several novel mechanisms that undergird cognitive processes associated with distributed forms of RE