AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO ENHANCING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT EFFICIENCY THROUGH AGILE METHODOLOGIES

Managers recognize that software development project teams need to be developed and guided.Although technical skills are necessary, non-technical (NT) skills are equally, if not more, necessary for project success.Currently, there are no proven tools to measure the NT skills of software developers or software development teams.Behavioral markers (observable behaviors that have positive or negative impacts on individual or team performance) are beginning to be successfully used by airline and medical industries to measure NT skill performance.The purpose of this research is to develop and validate the behavior marker system tool that can be used by different managers or coaches to measure the NT skills of software development individuals and teams.This paper presents an empirical study conducted at the Software Factory where users of the behavior marker tool rated video clips of software development teams.The initial results show that the behavior marker tool can be reliably used with minimal training.

Context: It is known that men practitioners are predominant in software development teams over women. In recent years, researchers have investigated gender inequality from different perspectives, such as gender bias and suggestions to increase diversity in development teams. However, while most of the existing literature investigates the perception of women practitioners, the vast majority of the software development workforce – men – has received less attention. Goal: This work investigates men’s perceptions of gender inequality in software development teams and their experiences compared in software development to women. Method: Our study conducted a survey with 217 male practitioners, using a questionnaire consisting of 27 questions. The collected data was analyzed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques, including graphical representations, percentages, and the grounded theory methodology. Results: Our findings reveal that most men do not perceive any sexist behavior among their team members and they are satisfied with the performance of their functions. In addition, their main suggestions to increase their participation in software development projects are offering training courses and improving the interaction among team members. Conclusions: The barriers and challenges that men practitioners face in software development teams are not the same as those faced by women. In addition, they consider that women do not work in software development due to a lack of affinity and knowledge about coding.

A recent survey indicates that 53 % of software development projects are over budget, behind schedule, or deliver fewer features than originally specified. Statistics also show that 31 % of development projects end up being cancelled or terminated prematurely. Among those completed projects, only 61 % of them satisfy originally specified features and functions. In today's environment, one of the greatest challenges a project manager constantly face with is to keep the projects under control in terms of budget and development time frame. A successful software development project relies on many factors; it is not that easy to control all of them and continually keeping those entire factors all going well together. The goal of this paper is to introduce a mathematical model and prove that a software development team can rely on it to accurately predict, calculate the risks and their impacts on the success of the project. Our objective is to conceptualize the model into a scientific tool that can be used to understand and calculate the risks of a development project. Subsequently, the software development team can take appropriate actions to mitigate the risks, and as a result, the project manager have a better control of the budget and development time frame of the project. It is the author's believe that if we can identify and control problems at early stages, we can significantly increase the chance of success of the development project. The model and the software tool written by the author in this paper to calculate the risks and weight their impacts on a project can be used to identify problems and their potentials risk at early stage. The tool also allows a project manager to apply the model and obtain results without getting involved in too many mathematical calculations. Although the model introduced in this paper can generally provide an accurate picture of what, how, and when things may go wrong at the beginning of a typical software development project, there are areas need further fine tuned, especially when it is used for a particular industry or at later stages of software development cycle.

Coordination of interdependent tasks across geographical, temporal and socio-cultural boundaries has been identified as a critical antecedent to global software development (GSD) team performance. Since GSD teams are increasingly required to achieve software development agility and respond to changing business requirements, conventional plan-driven software development methods become inadequate to manage the cross-boundary dependencies. To cope with this issue, there is an emerging trend of implementing change-driven agile methods in GSD; we call this practice agile GSD. This paper focuses on the formulation of coordination strategies in agile GSD. We argue that Coordination Theory (CT) can serve as a useful lens to develop a deeper understanding of the formulation process. We present a case study in a leading software development company using agile GSD and present preliminary results by applying the lens of CT.

Since the turn of the 20th century many leadership theories have emerged and evolved over time. Transformational leadership is one of the older, more prominent theories and has been used in organizations and in political arenas for many years. Complexity leadership theory, on the other hand, is relatively new in practice and academia. To date, there is very little literature addressing the similarities and differences between the transformational and complexity leadership theories as well as their comparative value in organizational contexts. Both the Complexity Leadership and Transformational Leadership theories are presented and the similarities and differences of each theory are discussed and evaluated. The purpose of this comparison and evaluation is present the theory’s foundations so that they may be applied to the challenges presented by IT software development teams. The application will result in determining and recommending the more effective leadership style for IT-based teams as well as presenting tips for successful IT software development projects. Understanding different leadership styles and their response to team challenges can ultimately contribute to the leader’s ability to effectively manage IT teams and successfully leading IT software development projects in organizations.

Traditional software development organizations have rigid processes that can be difficult to change. One of the most critical challenges is the management processes that can ensure the customer’s desired level of quality and optimize the organization’s resources. Kanban represents one of the most well-known approaches that bring Lean principles, philosophies, and tools into software organizations. This study analyses the leadership behind the Lean methodology, based on which the Kanban software implementation method has been created, by doing a literature review focusing on lean leadership principles that can optimize the software delivery and implementation. Lean practices can be applied in almost any domain like accounting, services industry, product services, and even software development. Two basic concepts stay at the core of the Lean model that can be employed at any organization level. The first focuses on eliminating waste by optimizing processes and systems, and the second focuses on maximized customer value. Consequently, it can be affirmed that Lean is focused on maximizing customer value with a minimum amount of waste. Furthermore, a case study is presented that shows the Kanban implementation at a software development company. The practical case of the Kanban adoption is analyzed, highlighting the link between the leadership principles and the process development flow. Finally, key performance indicators are identified and instituted to guarantee the continuous improvement of the software delivery model. The software development projects driven by the Kanban project management approach reported essential improvements such as waste reduction, team communication, and collaboration enhancement, work in progress diminishment, productivity-boosting, better delivery predictability, and project visibility. Therefore, the type of leadership influences the software development projects’ performance. The findings suggest that Kanban effectively enhances the software development delivery model and team performance.KeywordsLeadershipKanbanLean practicesSoftware developmentSoftware implementationAgile transformation

Delivered software is often late and over budget, while offering fewer features than requested by the user. Many software developers have difficulties establishing and adhering to a project plan and in delivering what the user wants within the budget and schedule. Developers also have difficulty in obtaining user involvement in the development process. This paper discusses a Web-enabled expert system, Project Management Advisor (PMA), which will provide alerts and corrective actions for some of the common problems that plague software development projects. PMA was developed as a part of a CyberCollaboratory built to facilitate collaborative project work. The development and evaluation of a collaborative generic expert system for identification and analysis of anomalies in project plan data is expected to be useful to many software development teams and managers in a wide variety of organizations PMA is a field prototype and was evaluated rising 11 real world project plans. The preliminary analysis of the findings is presented and discussed.

Changes in Indian workforce and globalisation have resulted in an increase in heterogeneous information technology (IT) teams. Team heterogeneity has been shown to impact various team outcomes. This paper examines the impact of demographic, knowledge and underlying diversity in IT teams on various team outcomes. Data were collected from 62 software development (SD) teams and analysed using multiple regressions. The result suggests that more than other forms of heterogeneity, underlying heterogeneity in SD teams has been consistently a significant predictor of the various team outcomes and thus impacts the team effectiveness.

Globalization and dynamic economic conditions have exponentially increased the use of virtual work in organizations. Effectiveness in software development teams, therefore, is now a relevant issue in business, psychology or other fields. Despite the uniqueness of software development teams and their work conditions, their effectiveness has not been sufficiently researched to clearly determine how it relates to personality traits, work challenges and the virtualization level. To expand the understanding of the mechanisms that influence team effectiveness in software development, an ecological framework is selected. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between personality traits, work factors and team effectiveness within the context of software development teams. Methodology: The exploratory study was conducted in international software development companies operating in Lithuania. Forty-five software development teams (N = 142) filled in the Team task performance scale, Hexaco-PI-R questionnaire and rated perceived work challenges and team virtualization level. The statistical analysis was conducted with SPSS. This survey is an initial stage of a larger project. Findings: Personality traits Conscientiousness and Extraversion relate to team effectiveness. In software development teams the most prevalent work challenges were time zone differences, lack of information when working on a project, and lack of a clear purpose. Lack of information and poor foreign language skills negatively affect team effectiveness. A higher virtualization level is associated with more frequent work challenges (culture and foreign language challenges, time zone differences) and team performance.

Software development projects still reportedly have high failure rates. The ineffective composition of the software team has been recognized as the main aspect of the failure of the software project. In this study, a classification model of the composition of an effective software development team was developed. The model developed consists of three predictor variables: personality, role, and gender. Outcome variables to determine team effectiveness are seen in the quality of the team. To measure the quality of the team, two metrics were used: team development level assessment and team dysfunction assessment. The techniques used for classification are logistic regression and decision trees. The experimental results show that the best method is produced by a decision tree with the highest accuracy value of 70%. Therefore, the results conclude that the use of the decision tree method can determine an effective team as software development team.

Today's software industry is fast moving and has daily changing demands. Many organizations are struggling to cope up with these emerging demands and they are looking for change in software development. Agile is most popular software development strategy in today's software industry, Agile provides different methods, organizations can choose suitable method to implement agility. Among all agile methods, Scrum is the most popular as of today. Although, agile is well suitable for large organization with distributed systems. Agile method such as 'scrum' can be improved further and it can work with other process and automation tools coupled with agile artifacts to improve software development team's performance such a solution can be applied to large scale industries. As no one solution is best suitable for today's business, hence the concept of 'Agile Genome' is becoming more popular, which encourages organizations to use combination of other methods and automation tools that can be used based on the application. Hence there is a need of discussing areas where agile and automation can work together and finding different ways of utilizing full potential of agile methods along with automation tools to achieve maximum benefits for the software industries.

The need for understanding Generation Y employees' attitudes and expectations that considerably differed from previous generations had been a focus of researchers in the last decades. IT industry and specifically software industry had been among the most popular employment areas of Generation Y professionals and hence Generation Y Software Developers constitutes the majority of the work force in the software industry. As known, software development is a project-based business where the project management methodologies and principles are utilized. Similar to other project based works, the effectiveness of human resources management and team development is the determinant of project success in software development. Therefore, to effectively manage and to adapt appropriate approaches for leading the project teams which include Generation Y software professionals, managers and leaders prior in need to understand their perspective. In this context, research aims to understand the expectations and attitudes of Generation Y Software Developer professionals in projects. The research is structured in two parts reflecting these dual aims. The first part of the research addresses the expectations of Y generation employees from project management and project environment in software development projects. The second part of the research explores the attitudes of Y generation Employees in software development project teams. Survey is conducted with the participation of 113 Generation Y Software Professionals who are employed in major software companies in Turkey. Basic concepts that are explored in the study are expectations from working environment, expectations from project type and content, leadership, motivation factors, challenges faced, perceptions on generation conflicts and the attitudes of Generation Y professionals towards project-based work and work environments. Software industry is dominated by project based management methods, perceptions and attitudes of Generation Y in projects are expected to provide practical guidelines to policy makers and HR professionals in developing solutions and tools for improving motivations and effectiveness of Generation Y employees.

Software development teams that work together well, particularly those that can operate virtually, are an enormous competitive advantage for organizations (Cohen & Gibson, 2003). One challenge for software development or new product development teams in a global marketplace is managing and developing individuals from different disciplines who are remotely located. Such teams often encounter communication, environmental and philosophical barriers related to completing design tasks that threaten the success of projects (Warkenton, Sayeed & Hightower, 1997). For students at the university level, virtual cross-disciplinary learning experiences are key to their success in the competitive marketplace. The authors are currently in the second phase of an ongoing project designed to explore pedagogical, communications and logistical issues related to development of a sense of community between graduate students in the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (U.S.) (Schaffer et.al., 2005). One of the main goals of the current phase is to learn more about how virtual cross-disciplinary teams communicate and learn the concepts, models and discipline-specific language used by one another, as well as to identify key barriers and supports to such learning. Request access from your librarian to read this chapter's full text.

Software development in project teams has become more and more complex, with increasing demands for information and decision making. Software development in projects also hugely depends on effective interaction between people, and human factors have been identified as key to successful software projects. Especially in this context, managing and analyzing social networks is highly important. The instrument of social network analysis (SNA) provides fine-grained methods for analyzing social networks in project teams, going beyond the traditional tools and techniques of project management. This paper examines the importance of the application of SNA in software development projects. We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of research on software development projects and social network data published between 1980 and 2019. We identified and analyzed 86 relevant studies, finding that research on software development projects spans the topics of project organization, communication management, knowledge management, version and configuration management, requirement management, and risk management. Further, we show that most studies focus on project organization and that the most common method used to gather social data relies on automated extraction from various software development repositories in the SNA context. Our paper contributes to the software development literature by providing a broad overview of published studies on the use of social networks in helping software development projects. Finally, we identify research opportunities and make suggestions for addressing existing research gaps.

The NA-42 TI program initiated an effort in FY2010 to standardize its software development efforts with the long term goal of migrating toward a software management approach that will allow for the sharing and reuse of code developed within the TI program, improve integration, ensure a level of software documentation, and reduce development costs. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has been tasked with two activities that support this mission. PNNL has been tasked with the identification, selection, and implementation of a Shared Software Component Library. The intent of the library is to provide a common repository that is accessible by all authorized NA-42 software development teams. The repository facilitates software reuse through a searchable and easy to use web based interface. As software is submitted to the repository, the component registration process captures meta-data and provides version control for compiled libraries, documentation, and source code. This meta-data is then available for retrieval and review as part of library search results. In FY2010, PNNL and staff from the Remote Sensing Laboratory (RSL) teamed up to develop a software application with the goal of replacing the aging Aerial Measuring System (AMS). The application under development includes an Advanced Visualization and Integration of Data (AVID) framework and associated AMS modules. Throughout development, PNNL and RSL have utilized a common AMS code repository for collaborative code development. The AMS repository is hosted by PNNL, is restricted to the project development team, is accessed via two different geographic locations and continues to be used. The knowledge gained from the collaboration and hosting of this repository in conjunction with PNNL software development and systems engineering capabilities were used in the selection of a package to be used in the implementation of the software component library on behalf of NA-42 TI. The second task managed by PNNL is the development and continued maintenance of the NA-42 TI Software Development Questionnaire. This questionnaire is intended to help software development teams working under NA-42 TI in documenting their development activities. When sufficiently completed, the questionnaire illustrates that the software development activities recorded incorporate significant aspects of the software engineering lifecycle. The questionnaire template is updated as comments are received from NA-42 and/or its development teams and revised versions distributed to those using the questionnaire. PNNL also maintains a list of questionnaire recipients. The blank questionnaire template, the AVID and AMS software being developed, and the completed AVID AMS specific questionnaire are being used as the initial content to be established in the TI Component Library. This report summarizes the approach taken to identify requirements, search for and evaluate technologies, and the approach taken for installation of the software needed to host the component library. Additionally, it defines the process by which users request access for the contribution and retrieval of library content.