Information flows at inter-team boundaries in agile information systems development

Agile software development methods are being used on larger projects thus the study of inter-team communication are becoming an important topic of interest for researchers. This research addresses inter-team communication by exploring the tools and three different boundaries, inter-team, team and customers, and geographically separated teams. In this research, we gathered data from semi-structured face-to-face interviews which were analyzed following the grounded theory approach. Our study reveals consensus from different teams on the importance of virtual Kanban boards. Also, some teams members tend to adapt to other teams’ preferred communication tool. We observed challenges around interdependent user stories among the different teams and highlighted the problems that rise at the different boundaries. Keywords: agile information system development • inter-team communication • agile team boundary • communication • agile methods • cooperating agile team

Bayesian Prediction of Fault-Proneness of Agile-Developed Object-Oriented System

15th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, ICEIS 2013, France, 4-7 July 2013Logistic regression (LR) and naïve Bayes (NB) extensively used for prediction of fault-proneness assume linear addition and independence that often cannot hold in practice. Hence, we propose a Bayesian network (BN) model with incorporation of data mining techniques as an integrative approach. Compared with LR and NB, BN provides a flexible modeling framework, thus avoiding the corresponding assumptions. Using the static metrics such as Chidamber and Kemerer’s (C-K) suite and complexity as predictors, the differences in performance between LR, NB and BN models were examined for fault-proneness prediction at the class level in continual releases (five versions) of Rhino, an open-source implementation of JavaScript, developed using the agile process. By cross validation and independent test of continual versions, we conclude that the proposed BN can achieve a better prediction than LR and NB for the agile software due to its flexible modeling framework and incorporation of multiple sophisticated learning algorithms.Department of Computin

Herding cats in a FOSS ecosystem: a tale of communication and coordination for release management

Abstract Release management in large-scale software development projects requires significant communication and coordination. It is particularly challenging in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystems, in which hundreds of loosely connected developers and their projects are coordinated to release software to a schedule. To better understand this process and its challenges, we analyzed over two and half years of communication in the GNOME ecosystem and studied developers’ interactions. Through a case study, we cataloged communication channels, determined the main channel from which we categorized high level communication and coordination activities spanning five releases, and triangulated our results by interviewing ten key developers. We found that a release schedule, influence (instead of direct control), and diversity are the main factors that positively impact the release process in the GNOME ecosystem. We report a set of lessons learned that encapsulates our understanding of how the Release Management process function in a FOSS ecosystem, we learned that: (1) ensure that the release team follows the main communication channels used by developers, (2) provide a common place for coordination for an ecosystem, (3) consider including both good technical and social skills in a release team, (4) aim for a diverse release team, (5) based on lack of power, lobbying and consensus based management must be followed, (6) help the release team in the coordination process with a well defined schedule, and (7) release team work is different from regular software work. Our results can help organizations build better large-scale teams and show that research focused on individual projects might miss important parts of the picture