Distributed Agile Software Development Research Articles

Test case reduction and SWOA optimization for distributed agile software development using regression testing

Test case reduction and SWOA optimization for distributed agile software development using regression testing

Impediments in Software Testing within the relam of Distributed Agile Software Development

Impediments in Software Testing within the relam of Distributed Agile Software Development

Enterprise architecture contribution in distributed agile software development

AbstractGeographically distributed agile development may experience a high failure rate due to communication issues, which has a negative influence on project performance. One suggested solution in the literature is to enhance both communication and project performance by implementing agile enterprise architecture. However, the empirical evidence that supports this claim is still scarce. To address this gap, this study empirically explores the role of agile enterprise architecture as an artifact in distributed agile development. The findings of an in‐depth qualitative case study from a dispersed agile development organization that involves teams distributed over three locations are used in this work. Over 2 months, data was gathered by interviewing 12 key members of the team and watching three Sprint sessions of agile software development. Text analysis qualitative approach was used to analyze the data. The findings imply that agile enterprise architecture has a positive effect on distributed agile software development communication, quality, and functionality. Agile enterprise architecture may also support on‐time completion, but a trade‐off with on‐budget may be necessary. These findings provide valuable insights, frameworks, and best practices that support organizations in achieving greater agility, collaboration, and success in their distributed software development initiatives. As this is one of the first studies to look at the influence of agile enterprise architecture on distributed agile software development communication and performance, further research is needed to confirm and expand on the conclusions of this study.

The impact of social media usage on expertise coordination and team creative performance in distributed agile software development

PurposeThis article explores how the social media usage affect team creative performance via transactive memory system, knowledge interaction and expertise coordination.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on the perspective of transaction memory system and expertise coordination theory. A research model was constructed and tested, involving 289 individuals from 67 distributed agile software development teams.FindingsThe results indicate that social media usage is positively correlated with transactive memory system, and social media usage and transactive memory system have positive relations to knowledge interaction and expertise coordination. Moreover, this analysis shows that knowledge interaction has a positive relationship with expertise coordination, and expertise coordination positively affects team creative performance. However, knowledge interaction has no direct relationship on team creative performance, and its indirect impact on team creative performance was fully mediated by expertise coordination. This research shows that social media usage by distributed agile software development teams can support the development of transactive memory system and promote expertise coordination. In addition, knowledge interaction alone is not enough, and expertise coordination must be achieved to increase team creative performance.Originality/valueFirst, this paper explores the mechanism of transactive memory system in distributed Agile Software Development teams from the perspective of social media, which is different from the previous information processing theory framework that confined transactive memory system to the cognitive aspects of knowledge coding, storage and retrieval. Second, this research focuses on the knowledge interaction and expertise coordination formed by team members in the process of communication in the context of social media usage, which confirms the crucial roles of social media usage and transactive memory system in team knowledge management and team creative performance. Then, this research also shows that the development of transactive memory system in the team is indeed an important factor to promote knowledge interaction and professional expertise coordination.

Identification and Classification of Risk Factors in Distributed Agile Software Development

Distributed Agile Software Development (DASD) is an amalgamation of Agile Software Development (ASD) with Distributed Software Development (DSD). Although DASD integrates the speed benefits of ASD with the cost benefits of DSD, however, it brings along various risk factors that arise due to the fact that both ASD and DSD works on a different set of principles. These associated risks must be addressed and managed well in time for the successful completion of the project. This paper reviews the current literature and presents the current challenges of Risk Management in the DASD environment. This paper also determines 71 risk factors associated with DASD and analyses them based on their causes and sources. Further, these risk factors are segregated into 11 different categories. Timely management of these risks may reduce the uncertainty of project failure in the DASD environment.

A Critique on Task Allocation Processes in Distributed Agile Software Development

Distributed agile software development is implemented to tackle the increasing competition and changing requirements of the software industry. It inspires the development of emergent software applications and supports user satisfaction with fast delivery to market at low cost. Distributed software development presents a complex distributed team structure of the software industry having various workplaces. Distributed agile software development requires effective and well-organized decisions during task allocation. Task allocation is a challenging activity across the spectrum of committed software developers in a distributed environment. Effective task allocation under the pressure of achieving project objectives is a complex management problem in distributed agile software development. Task allocation process is proposed to support effective task allocation in distributed agile software development. Firstly, we identify different aspects of the task allocation context to explore the basic requirements of decision-making in DASD. Based on the information related to the identified aspects, different types of process activities are defined; those should be fulfilled to support the task allocation decisions. Task allocation process during software project planning requires comprehensive information about various factors that influence decision-making. The proposed task allocation process is evaluated based on the process activities. None of the current state-of-the-art research works focus on an approach for task allocation that completely fulfills all activities related to high-level processes or low-level processes. We fill this gap by identifying, classifying, sequencing, and proposing these activities that can be used to realize a methodical approach for a generic task allocation process in a distributed agile software development setup.

Task allocation and coordination process in distributed agile software development: an ontology based approach.

Distributed agile software development (DASD) has gained much popularity over the past years. It relates to Agile Software Development (ASD) being executed in a distributed environment due to factors such as low development budget, emerging software application markets and the need for more expertise. DASD faces a number of challenges with respect to coordination and communication issues. Task allocation in such an environment thus becomes a challenging task. Adopting proper task allocation strategy is crucial to overcome challenges and issues in DASD. Various studies highlight the challenges being faced by DASD and have proposed solutions in the form of framework or models. Knowledge models in the form of ontologies can help to solve certain issues and challenges by providing a proper representation of data that is shareable among distributed teams. Several ontologies with respect to task allocation exist. However, ontologies incorporating factors and dependencies influencing task allocation process in DASD are limited. An ontology representing the knowledge related to task allocation and coordination is important for proper decision making in organizations. Based on an in-depth literature review and a survey conducted among professionals in industry, this paper proposes an ontology, OntoDASD, that incorporates relevant factors and dependencies to be considered in task allocation and coordination process in DASD environment. The ontology facilitates team coordination through effective communication and task allocation by defining the concepts to share knowledge and information in an appropriate way. OntoDASD has been properly evaluated and validated by professionals in the field.

Empirically developed framework for building trust in distributed agile teams

Organizations are adopting agile practices in distributed software development in order to develop quality software in less time. Using agile software development in distributed set up has its own set of challenges pertaining to face to face interactions, collaboration, time zone and cultural differences. A strong presence of trust helps to overcome these challenges. A relatively lesser number of empirical studies on multidimensional perspective of trust in distributed agile software development has motivated this study.

Task Allocation in Distributed Agile Software Development Environment Using Unsupervised Learning

In the paper, a novel approach for task allocation in DASD environment has been proposed. In the approach, new tasks (in the form of user – stories), are allocated to an employee, who is found to be ‘best’, on the basis of classification and rank ordering. For applying classification and rank ordering on data set of employees, Meta - Classifier Based Prediction Model (MCBPM) has been used that applied unsupervised learning. Results show that MCBPM – based task allocations provides accurate suggestions for the activity.

A Blockchain-Based Framework for Distributed Agile Software Development

Distributed Agile Software Development (DASD) is the most important approach for the modern software industry that allows geographically independent software development. In the past, different tools and frameworks were proposed to solve communication and collaboration issues in DASD but they lacked transparency, trust, traceability, and security. These shortcomings resulted in project failure or overdue, customer dissatisfaction, project deal cancellations, and payment clashes between the customers and development teams. This paper addresses and overcomes the major issues of transparency, trust, security, traceability, coordination, and communication in DASD by embedding blockchain technology. We have proposed a novel blockchain-based framework named as AgilePlus which executes the smart contracts on a private ethereum blockchain for acceptance testing, secure payment, verification of developer’s payment requirements, and automatic payment distribution into the digital wallets of development teams. The execution of these smart contracts automatically assign penalties to the customers for late or non-payments and also to the developers for overdue tasks. Moreover, we have also solved the blockchain’s scalability challenge in AgilePlus by utilizing Interplanetary File System (IPFS) as off-chain storage. Lastly, experimental results prove that the proposed framework enhances transparency, communication, coordination, traceability, security and solves trust issues of both customers and developers in DASD.

Task allocation and coordination in distributed agile software development: a systematic review

Large software companies are facing issues at project management level to allocate and manage tasks in distributed agile software development environment. Teams are located in different cities or countries with different profiles and expertise. When those teams are expanding, it is becoming more time consuming and difficult to coordinate. In order to do a proper assignment of tasks to an individual or team, a number of factors have to be taken into consideration. The larger number of influencing factors identified, the more the task allocation process can be improved. In this paper, we have done a review on the existing publications for task allocation and coordination in distributed agile software development. The study shows that most research works are either related to coordination process in agile environment/distributed environments or task allocation process in agile distributed settings. Only few have investigated on factors or approaches considering both task allocation and coordination. A systematic literature review has therefore been conducted over Google Scholar to filter out the most relevant publications from year 2010 to 2019. Results of the review are presented and analyzed in the paper.

A Technique for Transitioning Of Plan Driven Software Development Method to Distributed Agile Software Development

In the era of twenty first century where human being is moving forward from semi – automated systems to fully automatic and machine learning based systems, software development (SD) mechanisms have also moved from static and pretended process following mechanisms to fast, ready for advices and adaptability based software development methods. Due to this traditional software development methods following heavy documentation based step by step processes have become obsolete and software development industry is transitioning towards dynamic, incremental, iterative, customer – centered, light – documentation based system development mechanisms referred as Agile Software development (ASD). The transition becomes more attention grabbing in distributed environment referred as distributed Agile software development (DASD). Certain processes like – task allocation, backlog prioritization, test case reduction and prioritization use manual processes rather than semi or fully automated processes. This methodology of transformation needs transitioning changes in existing DASD systems. In this paper we have proposed framework for transitioning of plan driven software development method to distributed Agile software development. The major area of concern is to automate the manual processes followed and convert them to semi – automated and fully – automated processes.

Challenges in Distributed Agile Software Development Environment: A Systematic Literature Review

Due to increasing interest in distributed agile software development, there is a need to systematically review the literature on challenges encountered in the agile software development environment. Using the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach, 32 relevant publications, dated between 2013 and 2018 were selected from four electronic databases. Data from these publications were extracted to identify the key challenges across the system development life cycle (SDLC) phases, which essentially are short phases in each agile-based iteration. 5 types of key challenges were identified as impacting the SDLC phases; these challenges are Communication, Coordination, Cooperation, Collaboration and Control. In the context of the SLDC phases, the Communication challenge was discussed the most often (79 times, 33%). The least discussed challenges were Cooperation and Collaboration (26 times, 11% each). The 5 challenges occur because of distances which occur in distributed environment. This SLR identified 4 types of distances which contribute to the occurrence of these key challenges - physical, temporal, social-cultural and knowledge/experience. Of the 32 publications, only 4 included research which proposed new solutions to address challenges in agile distributed software development. The authors of this article believe that the findings in this SLR are a resource for future research work to deepen the understanding of and to develop additional solutions to address the challenges in distributed agile software development.

Identification of Dependencies in Task Allocation during Distributed Agile Software Development

There is a growing interest for Distributed Agile Software Development (DASD) in software industry due to multiple benefits such as availability of resources, low development cost, changeability and customer satisfaction. Carrying out DASD poses a challenge of effective task allocation, which requires active coordination between dispersed teams. Effective coordination can be achieved by identifying and managing dependencies in DASD environment. To understand the task allocation complexity due to dispersed teams at different sites, we identify different types of dependencies in DASD. These dependencies must be recognized as they have a profound influence on software product achievement using DASD. Identification and understanding them support management to timely recognize different types of issues that can cause delay, interruptions or even cancellation of Agile Sprints. DASD being an emerging practice, their understanding also leverages methodical task allocation that can optimize on quality concerns such as cost of development and quality of product.

A Review on Quantitative Task Allocation in Agile Software Development

Agile software development has been thrust area for over a long period. A large number of researchers are still working on different aspects of Agile software development and distributed Agile software development. In this paper we have done a review of different task allocation approaches adopted by researchers in Agile Software Development quantitatively. The tabular comparison shows the techniques applied for task allocation along with their pros and cons. After the study we have identified that most the task allocation approaches follow quantitative approaches for task allocation but during this process qualitative aspect has not been addressed vastly.

A Quantitative Framework for Task Allocation in Distributed Agile Software Development

Distributed agile software development is a promising paradigm, addressing the necessities of emergent software application markets that are described by huge user base and small time to market characteristics. A key decision involved during the development process, is task allocation to team members. An appropriate task-member assignment facilitates project management, lessens the complexities and influences chances of project success. Task allocation becomes a more challenging activity in a distributed agile software development due to insufficient understanding of different factors and dependencies involved. We propose a task allocation framework comprising of two phases: one, identifying factors and dependencies that strongly influence the task allocation decision; two, proposing a quantitative method that allocates tasks to team members who best match the task requirements. Task requirements are expressed as capabilities, catering for different aspects, such as technical, personal, and environment. Our method stays transparent to the targeted objectives, in this case the best match. Other objectives, such as quality and cost may be introduced conveniently; even multiple objectives can be addressed. Such a method also allows quality evaluation of task-member assignment during and after the project completion, toward minimizing related risks.

Risk Aware and Quality Enriched Effort Estimation for Mobile Applications in Distributed Agile Software Development

Risk Aware and Quality Enriched Effort Estimation for Mobile Applications in Distributed Agile Software Development

A New Framework with less Ceremony for Distributed Agile Software Development

A New Framework with less Ceremony for Distributed Agile Software Development

A supporting tool for requirements change management in distributed agile development

Software development industry has witnessed the growth of the agile movement and approaches. Applying the agile approaches and practices in the distributed environment will lead to gain a lot of benefits such as reduced costs, higher efficiency and better customization, on the other hand it will face many challenges for example working in different time zones, requirements changes, personal selection and knowledge management. In order to gain these benefits, it should address the challenges that will face the agile approaches in a distributed environment. One of the main challenges is managing the requirements changes during the process of distributed agile software development. Only few researches published in the literature, addressed the problem of requirements changes during the development process in distributed agile development. Most of the published researches in this context are based on industrial experiences which increases the need for combining the industry with academia within this area. In this paper an approach to manage requirements changes in distributed agile development is introduced. This suggested approach works to fill the gap between the industry and research in distributed agile development by combining the industrial practice and academic technique. This approach is based on a proposed feature model called a features tree. The approach is associated with a supporting software tool that helps to manage the requirement changes in distributed agile development. The supporting tool is tested and evaluated in real environments by software development professionals using an exhaustive set of criteria, and the results are promising.

A Framework for Agile Development in Cloud Computing Environment

Distributed agile software development faces difficulties for instance lack of visibility across development and delivery processes, complex and disjointed development processes, inability to capitalize on business opportunities, lack of communication agility between disconnected owners, development teams, and users or clients. However these difficulties are solved with the help of cloud computing services. This study proposes a framework to provide a skeletal or structural environment for distributed agile software development in cloud computing environment. The framework guide towards the best tooling to deliver a consistent, automated, governed, and unified agile software development process with reduced technical debt, and minimized project backlog. In addition to this, the study highlights the benefits of cloud computing in agile software development.