Context Of Agile Software Development Research Articles

Social Sustainability Approaches for a Sustainable Software Product

Sustainability is the use of existing resources without compromising them for future generations. Resources must be guaranteed in the environmental, economic, and social dimensions. Sustainable Software Engineering is an emerging research field aiming to minimize software development's negative impacts on society. Furthermore, software sustainability can be defined as a way of keeping something running at a certain level of quality in relation to these dimensions. From the social dimension perspective, it is necessary to confirm software's trade-offs, benefits, and impacts on society since it lacks empirical evidence of its achievements in software. In this research thesis, we will explore how the literature addresses the aspect of social sustainability during software development and understand how social sustainability approaches can be integrated into the context of agile software development. In the end, we expect to have a set of guidelines, activities, and practices that can be adopted by agile teams.

The role of knowledge-based resources in Agile Software Development contexts

The software value chain is knowledge-based since it is highly dependant on people. Consequently, a lack of practice in managing knowledge as a resource may jeopardise its application in software development. Knowledge-Based Resources (KBRs) relate to employees’ intangible knowledge that is deemed to be valuable to a company’s competitive advantage. In this study, we apply a grounded theory approach to examine the role of KBRs in Agile Software Development (ASD). To this aim, we collected data from 18 practitioners from five companies. We develop the Knowledge-Push theory, which explains how KBRs boost the need for change in ASD. Our results show that the practitioners who participated in the study utilise, as primary strategies, task planning, resource management, and social collaboration. These strategies are implemented through the team environment and settings and incorporate an ability to codify and transmit knowledge. However, this process of codification is non-systematic, which consequently introduces inefficiency in the domain of knowledge resource utilisation, resulting in potential knowledge waste. This inefficiency can generate negative implications for software development, including meaningless searches in databases, frustration because of recurrent problems, the unnecessary redesign of solutions, and a lack of awareness of knowledge sources.

Spatial and Temporal Audience Behavior of Scrum Practitioners Around Semi-Public Ambient Displays

Exploring spatial and temporal audience behavior around ambient displays is an important area of HCI research. It aids in, for instance, understanding better user appropriation in natural environments. However, there are only a few tools to capture said behavior, and simultaneously, little knowledge of the space around ambient display installations exists. In this research, we report on audience behavior observed during an in-the-wild study where we deployed our custom Ambient Surfaces solution in a professional, large-scale agile software development context for circa 5 years. Across 18 weeks in 2017, we collected skeletal data with two Microsoft Kinect v2 cameras resulting in behavior information of more than 30,000 passersby. Our results indicate, among others, that users did show the highest levels of engagement at quite some distance to the Ambient Surfaces and that people engaging in direct interaction did so rather purposely. Ultimately, this article encapsulates our research’s originality in four contributions including an approach to separate passersby from real users and an in-depth exploration of skeletal data. With the tools and methods illustrated, we hope to demonstrate manifold insights for future research on audience behavior tracking.

A teamwork effectiveness model for agile software development

Teamwork is crucial in software development, particularly in agile development teams which are cross-functional and where team members work intensively together to develop a cohesive software solution. Effective teamwork is not easy; prior studies indicate challenges with communication, learning, prioritization, and leadership. Nevertheless, there is much advice available for teams, from agile methods, practitioner literature, and general studies on teamwork to a growing body of empirical studies on teamwork in the specific context of agile software development. This article presents the agile teamwork effectiveness model (ATEM) for colocated agile development teams. The model is based on evidence from focus groups, case studies, and multi-vocal literature and is a revision of a general team effectiveness model. Our model of agile teamwork effectiveness is composed of shared leadership, team orientation, redundancy, adaptability, and peer feedback. Coordinating mechanisms are needed to facilitate these components. The coordinating mechanisms are shared mental models, communication, and mutual trust. We critically examine the model and discuss extensions for very small, multi-team, distributed, and safety-critical development contexts. The model is intended for researchers, team members, coaches, and leaders in the agile community.

Product Quality Evaluation Method (PQEM): To Understand the Evolution of Quality Through the Iterations of a Software Product

Promoting quality within the context of agile software development, it is extremely important as well as useful to improve not only the knowledge and decision-making of project managers, product owners, and quality assurance leaders but also to support the communication between teams. In this context, quality needs to be visible in a synthetic and intuitive way in order to facilitate the decision of accepting or rejecting each iteration within the software life cycle. This article introduces a novel solution called Product Quality Evaluation Method (PQEM) which can be used to evaluate a set of quality characteristics for each iteration within a software product life cycle. PQEM is based on the Goal-Question-Metric approach, the standard ISO/IEC 25010, and the extension made of testing coverage in order to obtain the quality coverage of each quality characteristic. The outcome of PQEM is a unique multidimensional value, that represents the quality level reached by each iteration of a product, as an aggregated measure. Even though a value it is not the regular idea of measuring quality, we believe that it can be useful to use this value to easily understand the quality level of each iteration. An illustrative example of the PQEM method was carried out with two iterations from a web and mobile application, within the healthcare environment. A single measure makes it possible to observe the evolution of the level of quality reached in the evolution of the product through the iterations.

Mining reading patterns from eye-tracking data: method and demonstration

Understanding how developers interact with different software artifacts when performing comprehension tasks has a potential to improve developers’ productivity. In this paper, we propose a method to analyze eye-tracking data using process mining to find distinct reading patterns of how developers interacted with the different artifacts. To validate our approach, we conducted an exploratory study using eye-tracking involving 11 participants. We applied our method to investigate how developers interact with different artifacts during domain and code understanding tasks. To contextualize the reading patterns and to better understand the perceived benefits and challenges participants associated with the different artifacts and their choice of reading patterns, we complemented the eye-tracking data with the data obtained from think aloud. The study used behavior-driven development, a development practice that is increasingly used in Agile software development contexts, as a setting. The study shows that our method can be used to explore developers’ behavior at an aggregated level and identify behavioral patterns at varying levels of granularity.

Challenges and Solutions for Addressing Software Security in Agile Software Development

There has been a surge in the number of software security threats and vulnerabilities in recent times. At the same time, expectations towards software and data security are growing. Thus, there is a need to ensure that security-related tasks are effectively integrated in the software development processes. However, integrating security practices with agile software development is not trivial due to, for instance, differences in process dynamics and the concentration on functional vs non-functional requirements. In this article, the authors present a literature review on the challenges and solutions when adopting security in an agile software development context. Their findings suggest that there are ongoing efforts to integrate security-practices in agile methods, but more research is needed to make the processes more optimized and simpler for developers. A rigor and relevance assessment on primary studies highlights a need for improving the manner in which studies on the topic are performed as well as reported.

Usability Integration in Agile Development Processes: A Practice-Oriented Best Practice Approach

Abstract Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) increasingly rely on agile software development. However, the majority of established usability methods have been developed with traditional software engineering principles in mind. So, one might assume that these methods and tools might not be applicable to agile development projects. In this paper, a possible approach to systematically adapting traditional usability methods to application in agile projects is introduced and documented as best practices. These best practices can be quickly and dynamically employed by agile development team members and can thus contribute to higher quality of software development outputs. The approach described in this paper was developed in the context of a German research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and conducted by one research institute and three software-developing enterprises and will be evaluated throughout the further course of the project. For this purpose, a number of best practices have been adapted to the context of agile software development and described in detail in order to allow inexperienced software developers of small and medium-sized enterprises to successfully apply these best practices. As two examples of these best practices, we illustrate the best practices ‘Contextual Inquiry’ and ‘Template-Based UI Design’ in this paper.

Countermeasure graphs for software security risk assessment: An action research

Software security risk analysis is an important part of improving software quality. In previous research we proposed countermeasure graphs (CGs), an approach to conduct risk analysis, combining the ideas of different risk analysis approaches. The approach was designed for reuse and easy evolvability to support agile software development.CGs have not been evaluated in industry practice in agile software development. In this research we evaluate the ability of CGs to support practitioners in identifying the most critical threats and countermeasures.The research method used is participatory action research where CGs were evaluated in a series of risk analyses on four different telecom products.With Peltier (used prior to the use of CGs at the company) the practitioners identified attacks with low to medium risk level. CGs allowed practitioners to identify more serious risks (in the first iteration 1 serious threat, 5 high risk threats, and 11 medium threats). The need for tool support was identified very early, tool support allowed the practitioners to play through scenarios of which countermeasures to implement, and supported reuse.The results indicate that CGs support practitioners in identifying high risk security threats, work well in an agile software development context, and are cost-effective.

Contextualizing agile systems engineering

Discussion about agility within Systems Engineering is ongoing [9,10,13] but there had been little discussion about the right context for it. This proposed a classification scheme for the right context of the Agile Development Cycle that was identified to be the main principle of agile development. Prior work about the context of agile software development [5,7, 8] was taken as the basis. Interviews in system developing companies were used to investigate the differences between context of agile software and systems development (hardware systems). It was found that the nature of the system is not only the main difference between the two domains but also the main driver for the right context of the Agile Development Cycle. In contrast to software, hardware systems that have to be produced physically often are difficult to be developed in small cyclic steps. Only if prototyping, testing, and implementing changes can be done quickly and cheaply, this principle is feasible. The system should not be safety-critical as well. Another requirement for feasibility is the willingness of customer to support this kind of development. On the other hand, some factors were identified to drive the demand for agility, like market dynamism, level of innovation, and rate of change. Therefore the context of Agile Systems Engineering was classified into the two dimensions: feasibility and demand. Some company examples were given to describe the different situations in this classification scheme. By using the factors one company can be classified within the scheme. So we find if the Agile Development Cycle can be put into the right context. For a situation where the Cycle is not feasible but agility is needed it we also show how it could be applied partially.

Coordination in co-located agile software development projects

Agile software development provides a way to organise the complex task of multi-participant software development while accommodating constant project change. Agile software development is well accepted in the practitioner community but there is little understanding of how such projects achieve effective coordination, which is known to be critical in successful software projects. A theoretical model of coordination in the agile software development context is presented based on empirical data from three cases of co-located agile software development. Many practices in these projects act as coordination mechanisms, which together form a coordination strategy. Coordination strategy in this context has three components: synchronisation, structure, and boundary spanning. Coordination effectiveness has two components: implicit and explicit. The theoretical model of coordination in agile software development projects proposes that an agile coordination strategy increases coordination effectiveness. This model has application for practitioners who want to select appropriate practices from agile methods to ensure they achieve coordination coverage in their project. For the field of information systems development, this theory contributes to knowledge of coordination and coordination effectiveness in the context of agile software development.