Agile Software Development Practices Research Articles

Hypermedia-based software architecture enables Test-Driven Development.

Using agile software development practices, develop and evaluate an architecture and implementation for reliable and user-friendly self-service management of bioinformatic data stored in the cloud. Comprehensive Oncology Research Environment (CORE) Browser is a new open-source web application for cancer researchers to manage sequencing data organized in a flexible format in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets. It has a microservices- and hypermedia-based architecture, which we integrated with Test-Driven Development (TDD), the iterative writing of computable specifications for how software should work prior to development. Relying on repeating patterns found in hypermedia-based architectures, we hypothesized that hypermedia would permit developing test "templates" that can be parameterized and executed for each microservice, maximizing code coverage while minimizing effort. After one-and-a-half years of development, the CORE Browser backend had 121 test templates and 875 custom tests that were parameterized and executed 3031 times, providing 78% code coverage. Architecting to permit test reuse through a hypermedia approach was a key success factor for our testing efforts. CORE Browser's application of hypermedia and TDD illustrates one way to integrate software engineering methods into data-intensive networked applications. Separating bioinformatic data management from analysis distinguishes this platform from others in bioinformatics and may provide stable data management while permitting analysis methods to advance more rapidly. Software engineering practices are underutilized in informatics. Similar informatics projects will more likely succeed through application of good architecture and automated testing. Our approach is broadly applicable to data management tools involving cloud data storage.

Agile software development and software practitioners’ productivity amidst the COVID-19 pandemic: a narrative review

Purpose As the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) impacts the world, software practitioners are collaboratively working remotely from home. The pandemic has disrupted software practitioners’ productivity forcing changes to agile methodology adopted by software practitioners in software organizations. Therefore, this study aims to provide implication on the issues and recommendations for improving software practitioners’ productivity and also examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on agile software development. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts a narrative literature review to provide early assessment based on secondary data from the literature and available document reports from studies published from 2019 to 2022 to explore software practitioners’ productivity and agile software development during the working from home directive amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 60 sources which met the inclusion criteria were used to provide preliminary evidence grounded on secondary data from the literature. Descriptive analysis was used to provide qualitative findings from the literature. Findings Findings from this study present the significance of working from home directive on agile software development and software practitioners’ productivity. More importantly, findings from the secondary data shed light on software practitioners’ productivity adopting agile software development amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the findings present virtual collaborative platforms used by software practitioners, technical and social barriers of agile software development during the pandemic and recommendations for remote agile software development. Originality/value This study explores the significance of working from home directive on software practitioners’ productivity during COVID-19 pandemic and further investigates how are software practitioners’ productivity adopting agile software development practices amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Besides, this study discusses the challenges software practitioners currently face and offers some strategies to bridge the gaps in agile software development to help software practitioners, system developers, software managers and software organizations adapt to the changes caused by the pandemic.

Improving active participation during enterprise operations modeling with an extended story-card-method and participative modeling software

The COVID-19 pandemic emphasized the need for process automation, using agile software development practices. However, when agile methods are used in scaled contexts, many software development efforts fail, mainly due to lacking requirements engineering practices. When business-oriented software needs to be developed within a scaled context, the story-card method (SCM), developed as part of a previous study, assists in structuring emerging software requirements within a taxonomy that represents enterprise operation. The SCM helps agile team members to develop a common understanding about enterprise operation when they construct the enterprise operation taxonomy. Digital participatory enterprise modeling (PEM) may increase collaboration and understanding among team members, especially when team members are geographically dispersed, when they co-model their understanding of enterprise operations. Using design science research to further evolve the existing SCM, we identified two concerns regarding the existing SCM: (1) The modeling software did not encourage active participation during modeling, and (2) Low quality of the resulting cooperation structure diagram (CSD) that is used to derive an enterprise operation taxonomy, i.e., the need to further extend the existing SCM. As main contribution of this article, we addressed previous deficiencies of the SCM, developing an extended SCM (eSCM), based on principles and guidelines that would encourage online participation during PEM, also providing a comprehensive case to demonstrate the eSCM. As a second contribution, we used survey-feedback from research participants, as well as activity tracking to evaluate whether the modeling tool encouraged active PEM. Our third contribution is to evaluate the quality of the resulting CSDs with suggestions for future improvement.

Enhancing IoT Project Success through Agile Best Practices

Worldwide spending on Internet of Things (IoT) applications is forecasted to surpass $1 trillion by 2022. To stay competitive in this growing technological industry segment, lowering costs while increasing productivity and shortening time-to-market will become increasingly important. Adopting Agile Software Development practices for IoT projects may provide this competitive advantage, as it enables organizations to respond to change, while being dynamic and innovative. Applying a mixed-methods approach, agile IoT practitioners around the world and from diverse industries were surveyed and interviewed. Our study recommends that Agile Software Development team makeup, practices, and methods should be tailored to the specific industry, culture, people, and IT application of an organization. People play an important role in the success of agile projects; therefore, our research focuses on identifying the critical attributes of agile teams to maximize success. Our study identified the five critical agile practices: Collective Code Ownership, Continuous Integration, Single Team, Dedicated Customer, and Sprint Planning and found that both technical and soft skills are essential for successful IoT development.

Mastering scrum with a focus on team maturity and key components of scrum

Several studies contribute with valuable insights into agile teamwork performance. Currently, Scrum is dominating the industrial agile software development practices. Yet, there is a lack of studies that directly explores the role of team maturity and key components of the Scrum framework on being successful at Scrum. We investigate the impact of team maturity and four categories of the Scrum framework (team composition, Scrum values, Scrum roles, and Scrum events) on the perception of being successful at Scrum. Hence, we uncover and provide deeper insights into the characteristics and practices of what makes a team successful at Scrum. We carry out a large-scale and cross-sectional survey. We conduct Pearson's chi-square test of independence and logistic regression analysis for team maturity and the remaining variables on being successful. After surveying 182 Scrum team members, the results show that being successful at Scrum depends on the team maturity level. Team composition variables (fully allocated, low turnover rates, required skills and expertise, and self-management) and directing work in accordance with Scrum values (openness and courage) have an impact. All three Scrum roles are important. Particularly impactful are the developers’ ability to adapt their plans, the product owners’ mandate to prioritize, and the Scrum masters’ ability to ensure that all events take place. Following all Scrum events has an effect on the perception of being successful at Scrum. This work constitutes a valuable contribution to agile practitioners and organizations who are already involved in agile development or plan to pursue agility. Organizations can influence Scrum teams’ journey towards becoming successful at Scrum by ensuring the stability required to allow team maturation and decision-making relevant to team composition variables. This work also provides reflections that are useful for Scrum teams’ practices and internal dynamics related to values, roles, and events.

A Mathematics Pipeline to Student Success in Data Analytics through Course-Based Undergraduate Research

This paper reports on Data Analytics Research (DAR), a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) in which undergraduate students conduct data analysis research on open real- world problems for industry, university, and community clients. We describe how DAR, offered by the Mathematical Sciences Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), is an essential part of an early low-barrier pipeline into data analytics studies and careers for diverse students. Students first take a foundational course, typically Introduction to Data Mathematics, that teaches linear algebra, data analytics, and R programming simultaneously using a project-based learning (PBL) approach. Then in DAR, students work in teams on open applied data analytics research problems provided by the clients. We describe the DAR organization which is inspired in part by agile software development practices. Students meet for coaching sessions with instructors multiple times a week and present to clients frequently. In a fully remote format during the pandemic, the students continued to be highly successful and engaged in COVID-19 research producing significant results as indicated by deployed online applications, refereed papers, and conference presentations. Formal evaluation shows that the pipeline of the single on-ramp course followed by DAR addressing real-world problems with societal benefits is highly effective at developing students' data analytics skills, advancing creative problem solvers who can work both independently and in teams, and attracting students to further studies and careers in data science.

Teaching C++ programming using automated unit testing and test‐driven development—Design and efficacy study

AbstractThe best practices of agile software development have had a significant positive impact on the quality of software and time‐to‐delivery. As a result, many leading software companies employ some form of agile software development practices. Some of the most important best practices of agile software development, which have received significant attention in recent years, are automated unit testing (AUT) and test‐driven development (TDD). Both of these practices work in conjunction to provide numerous benefits. AUT leads to reduced time to test, discover bugs, fix bugs, and implement new features; wider and measurable test coverage; reproducibility, reusability, consistency, and reliability of tests; improved accuracy, regression testing, parallel testing, faster feedback cycle, reduced cost, and higher team morale. The benefits of TDD include flexible and adaptive program design, cleaner interfaces, higher code quality, maintainability, extensibility, reliability, detailed evolving specification, reduced time on bug fixes and feature implementation, reliable refactoring, and code changes, reduced cost, reduced development time, and increased programmer productivity. Unfortunately, students in introductory programming courses are generally not introduced to AUT and TDD. This leads to the development of bad programming habits and practices which become harder to change later on. By introducing the students earlier to these industry‐standard best practices, not only the motivation and interest of students in this area can be increased but also their academic success and job marketability can be enhanced. This paper presents the detailed design and efficacy study of an introductory C++ programming course designed using the principles of AUT and TDD. The paper presents the pedagogical techniques employed to build industry‐proven agile software development practices in the students. As part of the paper, all the course material including the source code for the labs and the automated unit tests are being made available to encourage people to incorporate these best practices into their curricula.

How to make intelligent automation projects agile? Identification of success factors and an assessment approach

PurposeOrganizations are fast adopting new technologies such as automation, analytics and artificial intelligence, collectively called intelligent automation, to drive digital transformation. When adopting intelligent automation, there is a need to understand the success factors of these new technologies and adapt agile software development (ASD) practices to meet customer expectations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the success factors of intelligent automation and create a framework for managers and practitioners to meet dynamic business demands. Total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) framework is a suitable approach to integrate quantitative measurement with qualitative semi-structured interviews capturing the context of the individual organization environment.Design/methodology/approachThis paper identified agility factors and their interrelationships using a TISM framework. TISM results were validated using a one-tailed t-test to confirm the interrelationships between factors. Furthermore, the agility index of a case project organization was assessed using a graph-theoretic approach (GTA) to identify both the triggering factors for agility success and improvement proposals.FindingsResults showed that leadership vision, organization structure and program methodology were driving factors. The TISM model was validated statistically and the agility index of the intelligent automation case project organization was calculated to be79.5%. Here, a GTA was applied and the triggering factors for improvement of the agility index were identified.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitations of the study are described along with the opportunities for future research as the field evolves through the rapid innovation of technology and products.Practical implicationsThe increasing role of digital transformation in enterprise strategy and operations requires practitioners to understand how ASD practices must be planned, measured and/or improved over time through the implementation of automation, analytics and artificial intelligence programs. The TISM digraph provides a framework of hierarchical structure to organize the influencing factors, which assists in achieving organizational goals. This study highlights the driving factors which contribute to the success of intelligent automation projects and project organizations.Originality/valueThis is a first attempt to analyze the interrelationships among agility factors in intelligent automation projects (IAP) using TISM and the assessment of the agility index of a case IAP organization using a GTA.

Enhancing research informatics core user satisfaction through agile practices.

ObjectiveThe Huntsman Cancer Institute Research Informatics Shared Resource (RISR), a software and database development core facility, sought to address a lack of published operational best practices for research informatics cores. It aimed to use those insights to enhance effectiveness after an increase in team size from 20 to 31 full-time equivalents coincided with a reduction in user satisfaction.Materials and MethodsRISR migrated from a water-scrum-fall model of software development to agile software development practices, which emphasize iteration and collaboration. RISR’s agile implementation emphasizes the product owner role, which is responsible for user engagement and may be particularly valuable in software development that requires close engagement with users like in science.ResultsAll RISR’s software development teams implemented agile practices in early 2020. All project teams are led by a product owner who serves as the voice of the user on the development team. Annual user survey scores for service quality and turnaround time recorded 9 months after implementation increased by 17% and 11%, respectively.DiscussionRISR is illustrative of the increasing size of research informatics cores and the need to identify best practices for maintaining high effectiveness. Agile practices may address concerns about the fit of software engineering practices in science. The study had one time point after implementing agile practices and one site, limiting its generalizability.ConclusionsAgile software development may substantially increase a research informatics core facility’s effectiveness and should be studied further as a potential best practice for how such cores are operated.

Understanding the perceived relevance of capability measures: A survey of Agile Software Development practitioners

Context:In the light of the swift and iterative nature of Agile Software Development (ASD) practices, establishing deeper insights into capability measurement within the context of team formation is crucial, as the capability of individuals and teams can affect team performance and productivity Although a former Systematic Literature Review (SLR) synthesized the state of the art in relation to capability measurement in ASD – with a focus on selecting individuals to agile teams, and capabilities related to team performance, productivity and success determining to what degree the SLR’s results apply to practice can provide progressive insights to both research and practice. Objective:Our study investigates how agile practitioners perceive the relevance of individual and team level measures for characterizing the capability of an agile team and its members. Here, the emphasis was also on selecting individuals to agile teams, and capabilities associated with effective teams in terms of their performance, productivity and success. Furthermore, to scrutinize variations in practitioners’ perceptions, our study further analyzes perceptions across stratified demographic groups. Method:We undertook a Web-based survey using a questionnaire built based on the capability measures identified from a previously conducted SLR. Results:Our survey responses (60) indicate that 127 individual and 28 team capability measures were considered as relevant by the majority of practitioners. We also identified seven individual and one team capability measure that have not been previously characterized by our SLR. The surveyed practitioners suggested that an agile team member’s responsibility and questioning skills significantly represent the member’s capability. Conclusion:Results from our survey align with our SLR’s findings. Measures associated with social aspects were observed to be dominant compared to technical and innovative aspects. Our results can support agile practitioners in their team composition decisions.

Overcoming cultural barriers to being agile in distributed teams

Context: Agile methods in offshored projects have become increasingly popular. Yet, many companies have found that the use of agile methods in coordination with companies located outside the regions of early agile adopters remains challenging. India has received particular attention as the leading destination of offshoring contracts due to significant cultural differences between sides of such contracts. Alarming differences are primarily rooted in the hierarchical business culture of Indian organizations and related command-and-control management behavior styles. Objective: In this study, we attempt to understand whether cultural barriers persist in distributed projects in which Indian engineers work with a more empowering Swedish management, and if so, how to overcome them. The present work is an invited extension of a conference paper. Method: We performed a multiple-case study in a mature agile company located in Sweden and a more hierarchical Indian vendor. We collected data from five group interviews with a total of 34 participants and five workshops with 96 participants in five distributed DevOps teams, including 36 Indian members, whose preferred behavior in different situations we surveyed. Results: We identified twelve cultural barriers, six of which were classified as impediments to agile software development practices, and report on the manifestation of these barriers in five DevOps teams. Finally, we put forward recommendations to overcome the identified barriers and emphasize the importance of cultural training , especially when onboarding new team members. Conclusions: Our findings confirm previously reported behaviors rooted in cultural differences that impede the adoption of agile approaches in offshore collaborations, and identify new barriers not previously reported. In contrast to the existing opinion that cultural characteristics are rigid and unchanging, we found that some barriers present at the beginning of the studied collaboration disappeared over time. Many offshore members reported behaving similarly to their onshore colleagues.

Reconciliation of scrum and the project management process of the ISO/IEC 29110 standard-Entry profile—an experimental evaluation through usability measures

Software process standards and models are used in large- and medium-sized organizations to reach the Iron Triangle. In contrast, small and very small entities either ignore them or cannot apply them because these standards and models are technically and economically not affordable. Consequently, agile software development practices are usually used by small and very small organizations. The ISO/IEC 29110 series of standards and guides are now available for very small organizations, but their utilization with agile practices represents an agility-rigor reconciliation problem. In this research, we report the experimental evaluation of Scrum + EPG (a reconciled agile-rigorous software Project Management process from Scrum, and the Project Management process of the ISO/IEC 29110 series-Entry profile, documented in an Electronic Process Guide). Scrum + EPG was compared to Scrum EPG (a non-modified Scrum process also documented in an Electronic Process Guide). Thirty-two international academicians and practitioners, including experts and novices on agile practices, from Latin America, North America, and Asia–Pacific regions, evaluated six metrics of usability. A within-subjects design and Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank tests were applied for collecting and analyzing the experimental data. The statistical results support the claim that the Scrum + EPG was considered a high-quality conciliated agile-rigorous software Project Management process for the Entry profile. Given the scarcity of similar studies and the need for reconciling agile-rigorous software development practices, this study contributes to a plausible solution for very small organizations. Finally, further empirical research is encouraged to confirm, update, and extend the results reported in this investigation.

Agile Methodology in an SaaS Deployment Project

Agile manifesto has proven its ability in managing and execution of projects in multiple industry sectors. Many researches have been conducted on the advantages and applicability of agile practices in software development and information technology industry. In this paper, empirical research has been conducted to identify the differences in agile management practices between software development and software as a service (SaaS) deployment projects. Case studies of a payment card industry (PCI) organization have been presented to identify key characteristics, tools, and methods of agile project management practices practically followed while implementing and managing of SaaS-based projects. Moreover, best suited agile management practices for pre- and post-deployment projects have also been discussed.

Integrating Scrum development process with UX design flow

Nowadays, Agile software development practices are being widely adapted all over the world. Scrum is one of the most known Agile models, it satisfies the business needs and put the main focus on the product. One common challenge for the development of customer-facing products is having a good user experience. This paper presents integrating Scrum development process with user experience design flow. In this study, papers relating to the topic of user experience (UX) process integration with Agile development process, how to measure it and how to improve it, from the year 2010 onwards are reviewed. This is to identify how organizations can integrate UX design flow and Scrum development and get the benefits of both. The conducted review identifies a number of limitations in the existing integrations efforts. A proposed process model to resolve these limitations is presented. Along with our experience in implementing it on an ongoing software development project. The results of applying this process, its impact on the project outcomes quality and the employees’ satisfaction with the process are discussed. The goal of this study is to aid organizations in integrating UX design into their development process.

Big Data analytics in Agile software development: A systematic mapping study

Over the last decade, Agile methods have changed the software development process in an unparalleled way and with the increasing popularity of Big Data, optimizing development cycles through data analytics is becoming a commodity. Although a myriad of research exists on software analytics as well as on Agile software development (ASD) practice on itself, there exists no systematic overview of the research done on ASD from a data analytics perspective. Therefore, the objective of this work is to make progress by linking ASD with Big Data analytics (BDA). As the primary method to find relevant literature on the topic, we performed manual search and snowballing on papers published between 2011 and 2019. In total, 88 primary studies were selected and analyzed. Our results show that BDA is employed throughout the whole ASD lifecycle. The results reveal that data-driven software development is focused on the following areas: code repository analytics, defects/bug fixing, testing, project management analytics, and application usage analytics. As BDA and ASD are fast-developing areas, improving the productivity of software development teams is one of the most important objectives BDA is facing in the industry. This study provides scholars with information about the state of software analytics research and the current trends as well as applications in the business environment. Whereas, thanks to this literature review, practitioners should be able to understand better how to obtain actionable insights from their software artifacts and on which aspects of data analytics to focus when investing in such initiatives.

Tool for Generating Behavior-Driven Development Test-Cases

Background: Testing using Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) techniques is one of the practices of Agile software development. This technique composes a test-case based on a use case scenario, for web application acceptance tests.Objective: In this study, we developed a tool to generate test case codes from BDD scenario definitions to help and facilitate practitioners to conduct testing.Methods: The generated test case code is made according to the codeception framework format so that it can be directly executed by the tester. The procedure is performed as follows: map the correlation of the language used in BDD (gherkin language) and the code syntax of the test code in the codeception framework, designed the GUIs in such a way that users can easily transform the Use Case Scenario, built the tool so that it can generate test cases codes. Evaluation is done by gathering respondents; ask to run the application and gathering feedback from respondents.Results: This tool can generate a codeception test-case file based on the BDD scenario. Generated test cases can be directly used on codeception tools. The results of the evaluation show that the tools can help entry-level programmers in developing automated tests.Conclusion: The tool can help user especially entry-level programmers to generate BDD test-case and make easy for the users for testing the web applications.

Taxonomical classification of barriers for scaling agile methods in global software development environment using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process

Increasingly, software development organizations are scaling agile practices in the global software development (GSD) environment in order to meet the requirements of the quickly changing and regularly developing business environment. The main objectives of this study are to investigate the key barriers and develop a prioritization-based taxonomy of the barriers for scaling agile development in the GSD environment. Total twenty-two barriers were extracted from the available literature and categorized into five categories, i.e. “human resources management”, ‘coordination”, “technology”, “project management”, and “software methodology”. In the next phase, the identified barriers and their categories were further validated using the questionnaire survey. In the final phase, fuzzy-AHP method, a multi-criterion decision making (MCDM) technique, was applied to prioritize and taxonomy of identified barriers and their related categories was designed. The contribution of this study is not limited to investigate the barriers, but it also provides the roadmap to tackle the issues related to the scaling agile methods in the GSD environment.

A Novel Lightweight Solo Software Development Methodology With Optimum Security Practices

The diffusion of software into all areas of life and all forms of business, increases the demand for high-quality and secure software products. Software development methodologies are designed to improve the quality of software by incorporating practices that promote quality in the developed software. Software security is an important facet of software quality, particularly in this era, where most software is deployed for use over the Internet. Most research on developing high-quality and secure software is normally focused on teams at the expense of individual developers. In trying to fill this gap, in this paper we propose an agile secure-software development methodology. We design a methodology that promotes quality and security in the software products of solo developers. We integrate quality practices with lightweight security practices to produce agile secure software development practices. We draw quality practices from a solo software development framework designed in our previous study, while security practices are drawn from existing lightweight methodologies. We adapt Keramati and Mirian-Hosseinabadi’s algorithm to integrate the two sets of practices, taking care to maintain an optimum degree of agility in the target methodology. We evaluate the utility of the resultant methodology through a case study. Results from the case study show that our proposed methodology can be used to build quality and secure software products without compromising the agility of the methodology.

Every build you break: developer-oriented assistance for build failure resolution

Continuous integration is an agile software development practice. Instead of integrating features right before a release, they are constantly being integrated into an automated build process. This shortens the release cycle, improves software quality, and reduces time to market. However, the whole process will come to a halt when a commit breaks the build, which can happen for several reasons, e.g., compilation errors or test failures, and fixing the build suddenly becomes a top priority. Developers not only have to find the cause of the build break and fix it, but they have to be quick in all of it to avoid a delay for others. Unfortunately, these steps require deep knowledge and are often time-consuming. To support developers in fixing a build break, we propose Bart, a tool that summarizes the reasons for Maven build failures and suggests possible solutions found on the internet. We will show in a case study with 17 participants that developers find Bart useful to understand build breaks and that using Bart substantially reduces the time to fix a build break, on average by 37%. We have also conducted a qualitative study to better understand the workflows and information needs when fixing builds. We found that typical workflows differ substantially between various error categories, and that several uncommon build errors are both very hard to investigate and to fix. These findings will be useful to inform future research in this area.

Stepwise transition to agile: From three agile practices to Kanban adaptation

AbstractMany smaller companies cannot afford the time and effort to change their development processes all at once. In some cases, companies are not aware of the fact that many aspects of agile development are already in place. The aim of this work was to evaluate if an evolutionary transition to agile software development is suitable for small companies. We conducted a case study with a small company to start their step‐by‐step agile transition. Initially, three agile software development practices were introduced. Based on the assessment of improvements, the transition continued with three Kanban practices. Experiences with the improvement process and the selected practices were elicited by means of qualitative interviews for data collection. Our case study reports details on the implementation of the first practices as well as the way the resulting agile transition has taken so far. The positive experiences reported by all employees during the agile transition indicate that an evolutionary transition is suitable for small companies. The experiences concerning the transition process and the positive effects of the selected practices motivate practitioners to start their own agile transition.