Small Development Teams Research Articles

Organizational Changes in Adopting Agile Approaches: A Systematic Literature Review

Although agile approaches to project management were originally developed for use by small software development teams, agile methods quickly began to be used by entire department processes and, in some cases, to the entire organization. Despite this quick adoption, there is a lack of studies seeking a better understanding of the changes that an organization needs to carry out for agile implementation at the organizational level. Therefore, a systematic literature review was conducted to organize and synthesize knowledge in this field. The main changes reported by these studies were consolidated into four major dimensions, that together, provided a consolidated view on the topic. In addition to contributing to the theory of agile approaches, it is also intended that this research will support the organizations that plan to undertake this journey of transformation, helping them plan the actions needed to achieve the desired results more consistently.

System of stunting information centre development using waterfall method

Stunting is a condition in which the development and growth of children are stunted due to malnutrition. In Indonesia, 21.6% of the approximately 300 million stunting cases still exist. In an endeavour to combat stunting, the Indonesian government is holding posyandu at the lowest levels of government. Despite these efforts, a significant number of parents do not receive information about stunting. Therefore, this study will develop a web-based information application about stunting. The application is developed using the cascade methodology. The conclusion of this analysis was that the waterfall methodology is still applicable for small development teams. The application can then provide information on child development and malnutrition at any time.

CodeUP: A Web Application for Collaborative Question-answering System

The majority of collaborative learning and knowledge sharing (CLKS) platforms are built with numerous communication mediums, team and task management in mind. However, with the CLKS, the Question-Answering (QAs), User profile evaluation based on the quality of answers provided, and feeding of subject or project relevant data are all available. QAs are required for online or offline cooperation between team members or users. To that purpose, this paper presents a web application called CodeUP with features like QA system, Question similarity testing, and user profile rating for boosting communication and cooperation efficiency in CLKS for academic groups and small development teams. CodeUP is intended to be quickly established and step for academic or development groups to collaborate. As the CodeUP application supports the CLKS, it is also an ideal tool for academia and development teams to perform computer supported QA system and knowledge sharing in the sphere of work or study.

Comparative Analysis of Game Development Tools

This article discusses several engines used for game development. Developers use game engines as a tool to manage complex aspects of the gameplay. The article describes several engines: Unity, Unreal Engine and Cry Engine to choose the best one for the initial stages of development. Research has shown that Unity is a suitable engine for small development teams, Unreal Engine is designed to develop high-quality games with intense graphics, while the feature of Cry Engine is to create realistic natural environments.

Tool for Measuring Productivity in Software Development Teams

Despite efforts to define productivity, there is no consensus in the software industry regarding what the term productivity means and, instead of having only one metric or factor that describes productivity, it is defined by a set of aspects. Our objective is to develop a tool that supports the productivity measurement of software development teams according to the factors found in the literature. We divided these factors into four groups: People, Product, Organization, and Open Source Software Projects. We developed a web system containing the factors that influence productivity identified in this work, called Productive, to support software development teams in measuring their productivity. After developed the tool, we monitored its use over eight weeks with two small software development teams. From the results, we found that software development companies can use the system to support monitoring team productivity. The results also point to an improvement in productivity while using the system, and a survey applied to users demonstrates the users’ positive perception regarding the results obtained. In future work, we will monitor the use of the tool and investigate the users’ perceptions in other project contexts.

How Corporate Sustainability Affects Product Developers’ Approaches Toward Improving Product Sustainability

Human factors, such as an individual's competences and attitudes, have a decisive impact on the results of product development processes, especially in companies with small product development teams. Sustainability considerations further amplify this impact as such a multifaceted issue results in an extra layer of product requirements and hard-to-make decisions on tradeoffs. This paper explores the interplay of corporate sustainability and the individual approaches product developers exhibit toward improving product sustainability. For this purpose, a grounded theory study in the German consumer goods industry is conducted. Thirty-two expert interviews with product development managers and extensive secondary data are collected and analyzed. It is found that the corporate sustainability approach heavily influences how developers comprehend sustainability and how they conceptualize it for their product portfolio. Explicitly, the products considered for sustainability improvements, their innovation level, and the use of design stereotypes to signal sustainability improvements emerge as key decision levers. The findings emphasize that the human factors in the context of product development, specifically concerning sustainability, warrant more academic attention. Also, it is demonstrated that companies need to be aware of the organizational environment which they are providing for their developers when pushing for product sustainability.

Application of Data-Oriented Design in Game Development

Game development is a big, human resource intensive industry. Object-Orientated Design (OOD) is the most popular software design paradigm in game development. However, it is not the optimal choice whet it comes to performance and resource utilization. To solve this problem, Data-Oriented Design (DOD) can serve as an alternative for resource-intensive games where performance is the highest priority. The latter approach is often perceived as something exclusive to highly qualified specialists. Thus, a question arises whether DOD can suit and be useful for smaller companies and projects, and what are the trade-offs of using the approach compared to more wide-spread object-orientation.This paper examines the experience of a small game development team implementing two similar case study projects, one using OOD and another using DOD. After an overview of both implementations, the authors analyze and compare the two projects in regards to performance and maintainability. Recommendations are given on when each of the two design approaches should be applied and what are the corresponding skill sets for developers to use them.

De‐motivators for the adoption of agile methodologies for large‐scale software development teams: An SLR from management perspective

AbstractMost of the software development projects have traditionally been faced with severe problems in terms of quality, cost, and time. Researchers and practitioners have focused on agile software development methods (ASDMs) as an alternative to overcome these problems. Agile methods employ iterative development cycles, interspersed by user feedback. Agile methods were basically developed for small development teams. Scaling agile methods is a big issue from different perspectives. De‐motivators play a key role in project management as it allows early identification and prompt management of threats that may arise during project execution. The objective of this paper is to identify the de‐motivators while scaling agile at large, from management perspectives. We have adapted SLR and applied contrived search criteria derived from the research questions, followed by selecting the required research papers, data extraction, and data synthesis, which resulted in 15 de‐motivators from 58 relevant papers. Some of the identified de‐motivators are ‘traditional organizational culture’, ‘lack of agile experts’, ‘reluctance to adopt’, and ‘lack of management and commitment support’. The identified factors have been compared from various perspectives, such as continents, digital libraries, organization size, and so forth.

Definitive guidelines toward effective mobile devices crowdtesting methodology

PurposeThis paper aims to gauge developers’ perspectives regarding the participation of the public and anonymous crowd testers worldwide, with a range of varied experiences. It also aims to gather their needs that could reduce their concerns of dealing with the public crowd testers and increase the opportunity of using the crowdtesting platforms.Design/methodology/approachAn online exploratory survey was conducted to gather information from the participants, which included 50 mobile application developers from various countries with diverse experiences across Android and iOS mobile platforms.FindingsThe findings revealed that a significant proportion (90%) of developers is potentially willing to perform testing via the public crowd testers worldwide. This on condition that several fundamental features were available, which enable them to achieve more realistic tests without artificial environments on large numbers of devices. The results also demonstrated that a group of developers does not consider testing as a serious job that they have to pay for, which can affect the gig-economy and global market.Originality/valueThis paper provides new insights for future research in the study of how acceptable it is to work with public and anonymous crowd workers, with varying levels of experience, to perform tasks in different domains and not only in software testing. In addition, it will assist individual or small development teams who have limited resources or who do not have thousands of testers in their private testing community, to perform large-scale testing of their products.

Mobile devices compatibility testing strategy via crowdsourcing

Purpose This paper aims to support small mobile application development teams or companies performing testing on a large variety of operating systems versions and mobile devices to ensure their seamless working. Design/methodology/approach This paper proposes a “hybrid crowdsourcing” method that leverages the power of public crowd testers. This leads to generating a novel crowdtesting workflow Developer/Tester- Crowdtesting (DT-CT) that focuses on developers and crowd testers as key elements in the testing process without the need for intermediate as managers or leaders. This workflow has been used in a novel crowdtesting platform (AskCrowd2Test). This platform enables testing the compatibility of mobile devices and applications at two different levels, high-level (device characteristics) or low-level (code). Additionally, a “crowd-powered knowledge base” has been developed that stores testing results, relevant issues and their solutions. Findings The comparison of the presented DT-CT workflow with the common and most recent crowdtesting workflows showed that DT-CT may positively impact the testing process by reducing time-consuming and budget spend because of the direct interaction of developers and crowd testers. Originality/value To authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to propose crowdtesting workflow based on developers and public crowd testers without crowd managers or leaders, which light the beacon for the future research in this field. Additionally, this work is the first that authorizes crowd testers with a limited level of experience to participate in the testing process, which helps in studying the behaviors and interaction of end-users with apps and obtains more concrete results.

Implementing Three CATs Within Eighteen Months

The development of a computerized adaptive test is considered a labor-intensive and time-consuming endeavor. This paper illustrates that this does not have to be the case—by demonstrating the steps taken, the decisions made, and the empirical results obtained during the development of three computerized adaptive tests (CATs) designed to measure student competencies in reading, mathematics, and science. The three tests had to be developed and piloted within an 18-month period, and they were used directly afterward in six research projects of a large nationwide research initiative. To ensure the sound psychometric quality of the CATs developed, the item calibration ( N = 1,632) followed several quality control procedures, including item fit analysis, differential item functioning analysis, and preoperational simulation studies. A CAT pilot study ( N = 1,093) and an additional CAT simulation confirmed the general usefulness of the constructed instru-ments. It is concluded that the development of CATs—including item calibration, simulations, and piloting within 18 months—is quite possible, even for comparably small development teams. This necessitates an available theoretical framework for the assessment and a sufficient number of items, specific plans for the item calibration, simulations, and a pilot study, as well as an information technology infrastructure for administering the tests.

Defining an Iterative ISO/IEC 29110 Deployment Package for Game Developers

Software development in a small development team is a challenge, as people have to fulfill several roles, which in larger groups would have dedicated people. To help in this aspect, the ISO/IEC 29110 Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities has been developed to help organization and manage the workflow. However, the model presented in the ISO/IEC 29110 is rather abstract, and prominently follows the waterfall approach, even though the documents do amend agile practices as one acceptable approach. In game development this loosely defined approach is problematic, since games industry heavily relies in the agile practices with short cycles of iterations. In this article, the authors present their study of game development organizations, and describe the ISO/IEC 29110 deployment package “Highly Iterative Software Processes” which combines the Entry level model with the industry-specific requirements. In general, the definition of support for the iterative development makes the model feasible for the industry.

Lightweight application for generating clinical research information systems: MAGIC.

Our purpose was to build and test a lightweight solution for generating clinical research information systems (CRIS) that would allow non-IT professionals with basic knowledge of computer usage to quickly define and build a ready-to-use, safe and secure web-based clinical research system for data management. We use the acronym MAGIC (Medical Application Generator InteraCtive) for the system. The generated CRIS should be very easy to build and use, so a common LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl) platform was used, which also enables short development cycles. The application was built and tested using eXtreme Programming (XP) principles by a small development team consisting of one informatics specialist, one physician and one graphical designer/programmer. The parameter and graphical user interface (GUI) definitions for the CRIS can be made by non-IT professionals using an intuitive English-language-like formalism called application definition language (ADL). From these definitions, the MAGIC builds an end-user CRIS that can be used on a wide variety of platforms (from standard workstations to hand-held devices). A working example of a national health-care-quality assessment program is presented to illustrate this process. The lightweight application for generating CRIS (MAGIC) has proven to be useful for both clinical and analytical users in real working environment. To achieve better performance and interoperability, we are planning to recompile the application using XML schemas (XSD) in HL7 CDA or openEHR archetypes formats used for parameters definition and for data interchange between different information systems.

Selection of good practices for small software development teams

The world is increasingly dependent on technology and computing systems. Software organizations are facing a highly competitive market, and thus seeking good practices and processes that help keep them competitive. The quality of their products becomes a differentiating factor and is directly associated with these processes. The software products they deliver play a major role in this competitive scenario, to which small organizations do not have easy access. Our study is directed to those small and micro-organizations that lack the necessary financial assets to hire people, adopt and implement expensive processes, or even implement good development practices. In this paper we present our approach to help those organizations find good practices to enhance their software development processes. The method consisted of obtaining a possible company profile based on technical attributes, given as input to a knowledge-based system that derived a list of possible practices to be adopted according to that profile. Then project managers can select those more suitable to the company's present demands, and implement them in smaller steps according to the organization maturity levels. The approach was currently tested in two organizations that are by now implementing the suggested practices. The proposed system is freely available through the internet.

An Effective Development Environment Setup for System and Application Software

Introduction Software development is the construction of system or application software that can be deployed on computers to execute repetitive tasks; more or less this software automates manual tasks. Software development is very often understood as programming, or writing a source code by using a particular computer language, but it can also include all other tasks from an initial idea to the implementation of the same idea. Implementation in this case means specification of all details or algorithms, design, programming, testing, deployment, and maintenance. While most of the current literature is dedicated to the description of methodology and processes (Sommerville, 2001; Larman, 2005; Leffingwell & Widrig, 2000; Beck, 2002; Beck et al., 2001; Beck et al., 2001a), a very important part, the implementation platform, is often ignored. The reason is probably based on the understanding that the methodology should be independent from implementation details. The description of an implementation platform is ignored, and it is assumed that a method implementation requires a computer. This assumption is, of course, correct; because in order to execute the software we need a processor and hardware. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap information, and to draw attention to the concept that an effective development environment requires adequate tools. To be productive and effective, any kind of production requires tools, no matter where--in civil engineering, construction, mechanical engineering, or software engineering. Today it is unimaginable to even think about producing machine parts manually. This is a job for highly specialized machines connected to the computers, with their operations managed by Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems. Some will argue that software development is different, and of course it is, as any production type is different; however, the use of tools is a common pattern, and replacing manual work improves productivity, reduces the number of errors, and, generally speaking, significantly improves the average product quality. While it can be argued that these tools and the development environment setup are important for any software development method, we believe that an effective development environment is more vital in the agile and distributed development environment. In the case of the agile development approach, waiting a day or two for a new release to be deployed and tested is not an option. Short iteration requires prompt feedback. Also, what is very important today, when outsourcing is present, is prompt and timely information-sharing and storing, even in small development teams. Although communications through e-mail messages, chats, and over video conferences can help to share information and quickly clarify issues, they do not guarantee that information, as well as any conclusions or actions, will be stored in a repository that enables fast and easy searching, filtering, or retrieving. An effective collaboration environment needs tools that can inform and warn the stakeholders about any kinds of changes. Setting up an effective development environment in advance is very rare. Development environment setup, as well as using of proper tools, is mostly left to the particular developer. Although many IT companies are aware of the need to use an effective development environment and standard set of tools, very seldom does this awareness assist in the choosing of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) framework and target database software. Aside from creating an ineffective use of tools, this approach can also create a lot of issues in the future. An example issue is the replacement of skilled developers with those that are not familiar with the tools, or tool installation and configuration. An effective development environment can significantly speed up the software development process and improve final product quality. …

The General Method Study and Practice for Trans-disciplinary Design in Internet Platform of 3D Art Museum

In the digital era of rapid development of computer software technology, the collaboration of science and arts becomes trend of development in terms of digital media content design and innovation. Breakthrough to the traditional working model, such as individual or independent small scale research and develop-ment team, establish a research and development team that consisting of artists and software engineers in art school, and do col-laborative research and development project is a necessary requirement for the progress of the digital age. This paper focuses on China Academy of Art Online Gallery project that integrates the transdisciplinary resources. By using art, technology, software engineering practice and quality management methods together, this project attempt to explore a set of basic methods of combining art and science to improve the standard of creation, research and design for China's Internet 3D technology platform. It is important to break with the traditional narrow way of thinking boldly and explore the general methods of multi-team collaboration for innovative projects. It has far-reaching strategic and practical significance for digital technological innovation research in art and design, online game and animation industry.

Magic Potion: Incorporating New Development Paradigms through Metaprogramming

Software environments are typically based on a single programming paradigm, such as ontologies, functions, objects, or concurrency. This can limit what developers can represent and how elegant their solutions can be, so today's applications usually involve mixing and matching languages, platforms, and paradigms. However, cross-mapping multiple paradigms and platforms generates an impedance mismatch that increases a solution's complexity. Metaprogramming supports a lightweight process to incorporate different programming paradigms in a single development environment that's suitable for small development teams.

Ascending into order: A reflective analysis from a small open source development team

Open Source Software (OSS) has had a profound impact on the way in which software is developed and consequently on the perception of software development. This paper starts with a brief discussion of the eclectic techniques and processes, combinations of which may be used for OSS projects. A ‘real-world’ context will be examined using ‘Reflective Analysis’ focusing on the research and development team present within the Business, Logistics and Information Systems (BLIS) department at The University of Bolton. The reflective analysis explores some assumptions inherent in OSS development. Drawing on findings from experience, industry and background research, an attempt will be made to provide an insight into how in a small team, the use of OSS and associated techniques can lead to the successful development of software. Whilst early results show that smaller OSS projects may appear to have little or no formal structure with closer investigation it is clear this is not the case. Without at least some degree of management, the teams experience indicates that such projects may be prone to failure.

Experiences from large embedded systems development projects in education, involving industry and research

We present experiences from a final year M.Sc. course. The overall aim of the course is to provide knowledge and skills to develop products in small or large development teams. The course is implemented in terms of large projects in cooperation with external partners, in which the students, based on a product specification, apply and integrate their accumulated knowledge in the development of a prototype. This course, which has been running and further elaborated for 20 years, has been proven successful in terms of being appreciated by the students and by the external partners. The course has during the recent years more frequently been carried out in close connection to research groups. Our experiences indicate benefits by carrying out these types of large projects in an educational setting, with external partners as project providers, and in close cooperation with research groups.Having external partners as project providers feeds the course, students and faculty with many industrially relevant problems that are useful for motivational purposes, and in other courses for exemplification and for case studies in research. Carrying out the projects in close connection to research groups provides synergy between research and education, and can improve the academic level of the projects. A further interesting dimension is accomplished when the projects run in iterations, requiring new groups of students to take over an already partly developed complex system, and work incrementally on this system. The students are then faced with a very typical industrial situation. We advocate that students should be exposed to a mixture of "build from scratch" and "incremental" projects during the education.

Designing Radiotherapy Software Components and Systems That Will Work Together.

The radiation treatment planning and delivery process requires that many different computerized data sources, software tools, and computer control systems be smoothly integrated. These include computer-controlled accelerators and new digital imaging modalities. At the same time, the applications themselves are becoming increasingly complex. In radiotherapy, the variety of components to integrate is much greater than in other areas of clinical medicine, growing out of more than a 30-year history of use of highly stylized traditional computer applications and many rigid conventions and practices associated with these computer programs. The introduction of new tools and computer-controlled equipment influenced the evolution of radiotherapy planning software, leading us to take a new look at how radiotherapy planning is done. Addressing and solving these integration problems as a serious research undertaking is vital to continued success in deploying computer applications for clinical use. New software design ideas such as object oriented design, behavioral abstraction and mediators can solve these problems. Our experience shows that the time and effort to build high-quality adaptable modular systems can be kept modest and within the reach of a small development team.