Influences on agile practice tailoring in enterprise software development.

Agile development projects have become a reality in large enterprises using offshore development models. A case study involving seven international companies with offices in Bangalore, India, and London, UK was conducted, including interviews with 19 practitioners. The contribution of this paper is to illustrate the reasons for tailoring Agile practices within the context of large enterprises. The findings show that scrum roles and practices did not conflict with enterprise policies or processes and were thought to improve product quality and productivity. However, agile practices from the XP tradition were not so widely adopted. Test driven development did not integrate well within enterprises where independent quality assurance teams were constituted as separate departments. Continuous integration was found to be challenging where enterprise software products required time consuming regression testing and elaborate code release processes. While adoption of coding standards and collective code ownership are necessary to facilitate interaction between disparate stakeholder groups

A Grounded Theory Of Open Government Data: A Case Study In The UK

This paper explores the emergence and implementation of Open Government Data (OGD) as a part of e-government systems in the public organization. OGD has become a new approach and phenomenon among the developed countries to increase the citizen’s trust and confident to the government. Several studies have shown the importance of implementation of open data systems by the public organization and the potentials of open government data systems for better management. Grounded theory approach is used to build a theory by using semi-structured interview, 5 interviews in the UK as a pilot study with 4 interviewees from the local governments and 1 interviewee from the large national organization in London. We found that OGD could optimise the performance of government’s administration by using potential opportunities that OGD presents to them despite of challenges like data sharing, standardization in OGD, government responsibility and public awareness. We envisage that as OGD evolves over time, participation and responses from public organization especially from large organization would represent the practice of OGD as a whole. This could positively contribute to the transparency and openness of the government and consequently increase the confident level and trust of the people

Agile method tailoring in distributed enterprises: product owner teams.

This paper explores practitioner descriptions of agile method tailoring in large-scale offshore or outsourced enterprise projects. Specifically, tailoring of the product owner role is discussed. The product owner identifies and prioritizes customer requirements. But in globalized projects, the product owner must reconcile large numbers competing business interests and generate prioritized requirements for many development teams. The study comprises 8 international companies in London, Bangalore and Delhi. Interviews with 46 practitioners were conducted between February 2010 and May 2012. A grounded theory approach was used to identify that product owner teams comprise nine roles: Groom, Prioritizer, Release Master, Technical Architect, Governor, Communicator, Traveler, Intermediary and Risk Assessor. These product owner roles arbitrate between conflicting customer requirements, approve release schedules, make architectural design decisions, provide technical governance and disseminate information across teams. Understanding these roles will help agile coaches guide large scale agile teams

Empathetic consultancy: a reflective approach to ICTD.

Empathetic Consulting articulates positive characteristics of long-term ICT capacity building engagements using external advisors. Consultants need to demonstrate commitment to capacity building rather than service delivery, flexibility in adaptation of technical skills to local contexts and resilience in the face of crises. Partner organisations must harness and sustain resources to ensure capacity building takes place. Counterpart team members should be committed to learning, prioritising their own personal and professional development. A case study comprising six education institution ICT installation projects is used to identify factors influencing achievement of project objectives. Projects that do not align with strategic priorities of organisations and personal priorities of counterpart team members are not likely to succeed. New skills must be nurtured with confidence building increments over time. For example, a web presence project did not succeed because senior management commitment was not sufficient to overcome a skills gap and lack of an organisational process for content generation. Three projects that had support from senior management and coincided with technical interests of team members met their objectives and are currently in use. These projects demonstrated a growth of counterpart team skills and confidence, encouraged by declining levels of technical supervision

Agile Method Tailoring in a CMMI Level 5 Organization

We investigate the use and tailoring of agile methods in a highly disciplined CMMI Level 5 organization. We explore gaps between traditional agile practices and those required for enhanced levels of governance required by CMMI appraisal. We conducted a case study with recorded interviews from practitioners at NIIT Technology Ltd. The interviews were iteratively analysed and coded. Our findings show that agile methods must be supplemented with pre-sprint planning, evidence recording, project metrics, team self-organization, process standardization, and process base-lining to support the CMMI appraisal. There are challenges around Agile compliance with CMMI Level 4 processes and misconceptions about agile methods precluding documentation of the rationale for design decisions. This research contributes data to the tailoring of agile methods in a high-maturity CMMI context and will be useful for agile teams conducting level 5 appraisal

Evolutionary computation for optimal component deployment with multitenancy isolation in cloud-hosted applications.

A multitenant cloud-application that is designed to use several components needs to implement the required degree of isolation between the components when the workload changes. The highest degree of isolation results in high resource consumption and running cost per component. A low degree of isolation allows sharing of resources, but leads to degradation in performance and to increased security vulnerability. This paper presents a simulation-based approach operating on computational metaheuristics that search for optimal ways of deploying components of a cloud-hosted application to guarantee multitenancy isolation When the workload changes, an open multiclass Queuing Network model is used to determine the average number of component access requests, followed by a metaheuristic search for the optimal deployment solutions of the components in question. The simulation-based evaluation of optimization performance showed that the solutions obtained were very close to the target solution. Various recommendations and best practice guidelines for deploying components in a way that guarantees the required degree of isolation are also provided

A framework for achieving the required degree of multitenancy isolation for deploying components of a cloud-hosted service.

Multitenancy allows multiple tenants to access a single instance of a cloud offering. While several approaches exist for implementing multitenancy, little attention has been paid to implementing the required degree of isolation since there are varying degrees of isolation that can be implemented for each tenant. This paper presents a framework for achieving the required degree of isolation between tenants accessing a cloud offering so that the required performance, resource utilisation and access privilege of one tenant does not affect other tenants when there are workload changes. The framework is composed of two main constituents: 1) component-based approach to multitenancy isolation through request re-routing (COMITRE); 2) an optimisation model for providing optimal solutions for deploying components of a cloud-hosted service. We demonstrate using a case study of: 1) a cloud-hosted bug tracking system; 2) a synthetic dataset, the possibility of providing the required degree of isolation and optimal deployment solutions

Evaluating degrees of isolation between tenants enabled by multitenancy patterns for cloud-hosted version control systems (VCS).

When implementing multitenancy for cloud-hosted applications, one of the main challenges to overcome is how to enable the required degree of isolation between tenants so that the required performance, resource utilization, and access privileges of one tenant does not affect other tenants. This paper applies COMITRE (COmponent-based approach to Multitenancy Isolation Through request RE-routing) to empirically evaluate the degree of isolation between tenants enabled by multitenancy patterns for cloud-hosted Version Control System (VCS). We implemented three multitenancy patterns (i.e., shared component, tenant-isolated component, and dedicated component) by developing a multitenant component using the FileSystem SCM plugin integrated within Hudson. The study confirmed that dedicated component provides the highest degree of isolation between tenants (compared to shared component and tenant-isolated component) in terms of error% (i.e., the percentage oferrors with unacceptably slow response times) and throughput. The system load of tenants showed no variability, and hence did not influence the degree of tenant isolation for all the three multitenancy patterns. We also provide a summary of recommended multitenancy patterns for optimizing performance and utilization of resources for cloud-hosted software services, as well as recommendations to guide an architect in implementing multitenancy isolation on similar VCS tools like Subversion and CVS

Evaluating degrees of multitenancy isolation: a case study of cloud-hosted GSD tools.

Multitenancy is an essential cloud computing property where a single instance of an application serves multiple tenants. Multitenancy introduces significant challenges when deploying application components to the cloud due to the demand for different degrees of isolation between tenants. At the very basic degree of isolation, tenants still share application components as much as possible. However, while some components may benefit from low degree of isolation between tenants, others may need a higher degree of isolation, for instance, in a situation where a component is too critical to be shared, or needs to be configured specifically for individual tenants. This paper describes COMITRE (COmponent-based approach to Multitenancy Isolation Through request RE-routing) to empirically evaluate the degree of isolation between tenants enabled by three multitenancy patterns (i.e., shared component, tenant-isolated component, and dedicated component) for cloud-hosted Global Software Development (GSD) tools. We developed a multitenant component for each multitenancy pattern, integrated it within Hudson, and then compared their impact on different tenants. The study revealed among other things that a component deployed based on shared component offers a lower degree of tenant isolation (than tenant-isolated component and dedicated component) when one of the tenants is exposed to a demanding deployment condition (e.g, large instant loads). We also provide some recommendations to guide an architect in implementing multitenancy isolation on a set of GSD tools: Hudson, Subversion and Bugzilla