Meetings and Mood-Related or Not? Insights from Student Software Projects

[Background:] Teamwork, coordination, and communication are a prerequisite for the timely completion of a software project. Meetings as a facilitator for coordination and communication are an established medium for information exchange. Analyses of meetings in software projects have shown that certain interactions in these meetings, such as proactive statements followed by supportive ones, influence the mood and motivation of a team, which in turn affects its productivity. So far, however, research has focused only on certain interactions at a detailed level, requiring a complex and fine-grained analysis of a meeting itself. [Aim:] In this paper, we investigate meetings from a more abstract perspective, focusing on the polarity of the statements, i.e., whether they appear to be positive, negative, or neutral. [Method:] We analyze the relationship between the polarity of statements in meetings and different social aspects, including conflicts as well as the mood before and after a meeting. [Results:] Our results emerge from 21 student software project meetings and show some interesting insights: (1) Positive mood before a meeting is both related to the amount of positive statements in the beginning, as well as throughout the whole meeting, (2) negative mood before the meeting only influences the amount of negative statements in the first quarter of the meeting, but not the whole meeting, and (3) the amount of positive and negative statements during the meeting has no influence on the mood afterwards. [Conclusions:] We conclude that the behaviour in meetings might rather influence short-term emotional states (feelings) than long-term emotional states (mood), which are more important for the project

How agile coaches create an agile mindset in development teams: Insights from an interview study

Since the publication of the agile manifesto in 2001, many companies implement an agile—or at least more agile—software development process. However, only including agile methods or practices in the overall process does not guarantee being agile. The mindset of the people involved in the process, including the development team, the customers, and the management, is of particular importance. As such an agile mindset cannot be enforced, the process of creating a suitable mindset needs to be handled with care. In an interview study with nine agile coaches, we analyzed which aspects they perceive being of particular importance during an agile transformation. One of these aspects is the agile mindset. We figure out how they support the creation of such a mindset. We identify 12 categories related to the process of creating an agile mindset. These categories include the collaboration between the coach and the management as well as the necessity to internalize the agile values. The main factor for succeeding with the creation of an agile mindset, however, can be hardly influenced: The success strongly depends on the personal prerequisites and attitudes of the individuals involved in the process, mainly the development team. We synthesize the results of our study into a timeline describing the process of how an agile coach can support the development team creating an agile mindset as part of the transformation towards an agile development process

When you don’t know with whom to collaborate: Towards an interactive system connecting contributors in a research project

Stakeholders are important for software projects as they help to define the requirements. However, in case of multiple stakeholders with different viewpoints, it is often difficult to find a suitable solution for almost everybody. We faced this situation in a large interdisciplinary research project with contributors from different natural sciences. The contributors have to collaborate with each other, i.e., they need to share and exchange knowledge, data, and research strategies from their disciplines. In order to support them, we develop an approach that facilitates the collaboration by enabling data exchange between research groups. However, the contributors – i.e., stakeholders – do not know with whom and how to collaborate. Therefore, it is difficult to identify stakeholders who can contribute to the requirements elicitation at the moment. In this paper, we present the first idea of our approach, as well as faced and expected challenges and open questions

Defining Frames to Structure Agile Development in Hybrid Settings - A Multi-Case Interview Study

Companies often combine agile and plan-based methods to so-called hybrid development approaches to benefit from the advantages of both. Recent research highlights conflicts introduced when combining agile and plan-based approaches in the different phases of the software lifecycle. For example, using both agile and plan-based methods during the requirements engineering of a project requires a decision on how many requirements should be gathered up-front and how many can be gathered during the runtime of a project. These conflicts need to be solved in order to construct a successful development approach. In order to investigate why the conflicts exist, how they are addressed in industry, and how they are related to each other, we performed a multi-case interview study with 15 practitioners. Our results reveal that the conflicts exist because companies use plan-based approaches to structure their agile development and define spaces of freedom and flexibility at the same time. From this insight and our results, we derive a theory that shows how companies structure their development stepwise by defining frames

Diversity is Key: Fantasy football dream teams under budget constraints

Imagine you are managing a football team and have a fixed budget for salaries. Which players should you draft for your team? We investigated this question using the wealth of data available from fantasy premier league football (soccer). Using the players' data from past seasons, for several seasons and several different budget constraints, we identified the highest scoring fantasy team for each season subject to each budget constraint. We then investigated quantifiable characteristics of these teams. Interesting, across nearly every variable that is significant to the game of football and the budget, these top teams display diversity across these variables. Our results indicate that diversity is a general feature of top performing teams.Comment: 21 pages, 6 tables, 5 figure

Divide and Conquer the EmpiRE: A Community-Maintainable Knowledge Graph of Empirical Research in Requirements Engineering

[Background.] Empirical research in requirements engineering (RE) is a constantly evolving topic, with a growing number of publications. Several papers address this topic using literature reviews to provide a snapshot of its "current" state and evolution. However, these papers have never built on or updated earlier ones, resulting in overlap and redundancy. The underlying problem is the unavailability of data from earlier works. Researchers need technical infrastructures to conduct sustainable literature reviews. [Aims.] We examine the use of the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) as such an infrastructure to build and publish an initial Knowledge Graph of Empirical research in RE (KG-EmpiRE) whose data is openly available. Our long-term goal is to continuously maintain KG-EmpiRE with the research community to synthesize a comprehensive, up-to-date, and long-term available overview of the state and evolution of empirical research in RE. [Method.] We conduct a literature review using the ORKG to build and publish KG-EmpiRE which we evaluate against competency questions derived from a published vision of empirical research in software (requirements) engineering for 2020 - 2025. [Results.] From 570 papers of the IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (2000 - 2022), we extract and analyze data on the reported empirical research and answer 16 out of 77 competency questions. These answers show a positive development towards the vision, but also the need for future improvements. [Conclusions.] The ORKG is a ready-to-use and advanced infrastructure to organize data from literature reviews as knowledge graphs. The resulting knowledge graphs make the data openly available and maintainable by research communities, enabling sustainable literature reviews.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 17th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2023