Do agile managed information systems projects fail due to a lack of emotional intelligence?

YesAgile development methodologies (ADM) have become a widely implemented project management approach in Information Systems (IS). Yet, along with its growing popularity, the amount of concerns raised in regard to human related challenges caused by applyingADMare rapidly increasing. Nevertheless, the extant scholarly literature has neglected to identify the primary origins and reasons of these challenges. The purpose of this study is therefore to examine if these human related challenges are related to a lack of Emotional Intelligence (EI) by means of a quantitative approach. Froma sample of 194 agile practitioners, EI was found to be significantly correlated to human related challenges in agile teams in terms of anxiety, motivation, mutual trust and communication competence. Hence, these findings offer important new knowledge for IS-scholars, project managers and human resource practitioners, about the vital role of EI for staffing and training of agile managed IS-projects

An agile method for teaching agile in business schools

The aim of this paper is to describe, evaluate and discuss a new method for teaching agile project management and similar subjects in higher education. Agile is not only a subject domain in this work, the teaching method itself is based on Scrum, a popular agile methodology mostly used in software development projects. The method is supported by wikis, a natural platform for simulation of software development environments. The findings from the evaluation indicate that the method enables the creation of “significant learning”, which prepares students for life-long learning and increases their employability. However, the knowledge gains, resulting from wiki interactions are found to be more quantitative than qualitative. The results also imply that despite the active promotion of agile values of communication and feedback, issues regarding the teamwork are still emerging. The engagement of the teacher in the learning and teaching process was discovered to be a motivational factor for the team cohesion. This paper could be of interest to anyone planning to teach agile in the higher education settings, but also to a wider academic community interested in applying agile methods in their own teaching practicePeer reviewe

Lightweight Evaluation of Software Architecture Decisions

Software architecture is an important foundation of every software project. Therefore, it is advisable to evaluate it in early stages of the software design. Architecture evaluation helps to uncover risks and suboptimal decisions before they cause tremendous cost and re-engineering efforts. Unfortunately, many software companies still do not integrate architecture evaluations into their software projects as a standard activity. This is partially because architecture evaluation is perceived as complicated and time-consuming by some people. Modern agile development methodologies are perceived as avoiding up-front architectural design, which amplifies this problem. In this chapter, we present an extended description of the decision-centric architecture review (DCAR) method. DCAR is lightweight and easy to integrate into different types of software projects (traditional and agile projects). We present the method in detail and show how it can be used in an incremental development process. Additionally, we explain different approaches for integrating DCAR with Scrum to support continuous and iterative architecture evaluation. Finally, we present industrial experiences from the evaluations we carried out using DCAR, both as external reviewers in industrial projects and when applying DCAR in our own industrial software projects