Using ODC to diagnose an Agile enterprise application development project

Companies are adapting their traditional development processes, aiming for project-specific designs that are referred to as “Agile Product Development” - flexible, adaptive and accelerated processes. Implementing these principles supports developers to react to challenges such as shortened innovation cycles. For successful implementation and use of these new principles, support functions such as procurement have to be adapted to the demands of flexible, agile and accelerated processes. Complexity of tasks and impact on corporate success of procurement increased significantly in the last decades resulting in specialized stand-alone procurement departments. Being optimized for traditional development methods such as stage-gate, these departments will be challenged by agile developers demanding for highly flexible, hardly predictable procurement activities. Therefore, the authors present a scientifically derived catalog of requirements for procurement in agile product and technology development projects, e.g. shortened lead times and vague technical specification of products to be procured. Based on this catalog, options for the configuration of procurement in agile development projects, such as the organizational merging of development and procurement, are discussed. Adapting the procurement according to the requirements derived in this paper will help companies to successfully conduct procurement activities in regard to the needs of agile new product development.

The more dynamic and unpredictable the development constraints, the more agile the development project should be to cope with and utilize inherent change. Especially in such contexts, aligning with the project's mission and vision, committing to next steps, and documenting the development path is challenging. To support the decision making process of self-organized agile development teams with an overview, a recent research paper proposes the Progress Map. The investigation at hand applies the Progress Map in semi-industrial development projects to empirically validate its applicability and performance in the form of a multi-case study. The results indicate that, given future refinements, this instrument can be valuable to plan, document, and communicate the progress of an agile development project.

It is a conundrum that agile projects can succeed ‘without requirements’ when weak requirements engineering is a known cause for project failures. While Agile development projects often manage well without extensive requirements documentation, test cases are commonly used as requirements. We have investigated this agile practice at three companies in order to understand how test cases can fill the role of requirements. We performed a case study based on twelve interviews performed in a previous study. The findings include a range of benefits and challenges in using test cases for eliciting, validating, verifying, tracing and managing requirements. In addition, we identified three scenarios for applying the practice, namely as a mature practice, as a de facto practice and as part of an agile transition. The findings provide insights into how the role of requirements may be met in agile development including challenges to consider.

This study aims to examine the influence of new software product efficiency and effectiveness on agile software development project success, with a particular focus on the mediating roles of market information capabilities, customer involvement, and R&D capabilities within IT companies operating in Portugal. Data were collected using purposive and convenience sampling from 418 employees across various IT SMEs in Portugal. The analysis was conducted using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS v.4 software. The study found that both software product efficiency and effectiveness significantly and positively influence agile software development project success. Furthermore, R&D capabilities and market information management capabilities (MIMC) positively mediate these relationships, whereas customer involvement (CI) has a significant but negative mediating effect. These findings are highly relevant to agile practitioners, suggesting that for agile development projects to succeed, managers should focus on assembling capable teams and fostering effective customer collaboration and interaction, while also leveraging R&D and market information strengths. This research offers a novel framework integrating technical performance metrics with organizational capabilities to explain agile project success. It provides new insights into how different mediating factors influence the relationship between product characteristics and project outcomes in agile software environments.

PurposeThis study aims to examine the joint impact of networking capability and agile project management on organizational agility of telecommunication technology providers' in Indonesia. The study also examines the moderating role of market orientation as a predominant strategic orientation on the relationship between agile project management and organizational agility.Design/methodology/approachResearch data were collected via a questionnaire survey from the executive management of telecommunication technology providers in Indonesia to obtain 150 valid questionnaires for analysis. This study analyzed the overall model fit and causal relationship using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.FindingsThe results indicate that networking capability positively affects organizational agility. However, agile project management's significant effect on organizational agility occurs only when the relationship is moderated by market orientation. The results of the study also demonstrate that organizational agility positively affects organizational performance.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is based on a cross-sectional nature and might fail to capture the studied variables' dynamic over an extended period.Originality/valueThe study enriches the previous literature in organizational agility by presenting the collective impact of networking capability and agile project management and the moderating role of market orientation. However, dissimilar with major prior studies, the results indicate that agile project management's direct effect on organizational agility is not significant. Agile project management needs to be moderated by market orientation to create exceptional customer values and overcome the competition for the organization to achieve organizational agility, responsiveness and adaptability to address customers' needs and requirements. Furthermore, the study's result corroborates the importance of organizational agility to achieve organizational performance in the highly dynamic telecommunication industry.

Technical Debt is a term coined by Ward Cunningham to denote the amount of rework required to put a piece of software into that state which it should have had from the beginning. The term outdates the agile revolution. Technical debt can occur using any development approach, but since agile development has become wide spread the notion of “technical debt” has gained much more attention. That is because if agile development is not done properly, technical debt accrues very fast and threatens to strangle the project. In this paper the author describes how technical debt comes to being, how it can be measured and what can be done to prevent it in agile development. The emphasis of the paper is on how to prevent it. What measures are necessary in an agile development project to keep technical debt from accruing over time? The paper lists out a number of measures which can be taken – organizational, procedural and technical. Automated tools play an important role in the struggle against technical debt. Samples are given how a tool can be helpful in identifying and removing problems before they get out of hand. Also important is an external auditing agency which monitors projects in progress with the aide of automated tools. In the end a case study is presented which illustrates the monitoring of technical debt within an agile development and what counter measures are required to stop it.KeywordsTechnical debtcode qualityproduct documentationsoftware defectsrefactoringsoftware metricsagile team organizationagile testing

agile information systems, flexible information systems development, distributed information systems development, global software development, software development, special issue

© 27th European Conference on Information Systems - Information Systems for a Sharing Society, ECIS 2019. All rights reserved. The importance of information security in software development projects is long recognised, with many comprehensive standards and procedures in use to provide assurance of information security. The agile development paradigm conflicts with traditional security assurance by emphasising the delivery of functional requirements and a reduction in structured and linear development styles. Through a series of thirteen qualitative interviews, this study identifies practices that address this problem which have been successfully adopted by agile practitioners. The findings present four categories of practices - organisational, team, project, and technical - and twelve critical success factors that should be explicitly considered by practitioners to assure agile security. The critical success factors provide a foundation for practitioners to strategically identify and develop best practices to embed information security in agile development projects. The identified categories also highlight the importance of agile security practices centring around individuals and culture and contributes to the literature by providing a representation of agile security practices that encompasses a broad range of focal areas.

This paper presents an automatic technique for making simple inferences about the stages in a software production process, discusses implementation of the technique, and validates the technique using defect data from several software development projects. The technique represents an approach to automate process feedback that may be based on either experience and common sense or historical data. Specifically, we present (1) A software defect classification scheme that relates defects to process stages. As an example of such a scheme, we describe ‘orthogonal defect classification’, which associates types of defects with stages, such as high-level design, low-level design, code, and system test. These associations are summarized in a ‘principal association’ table, which serves as a model for the production process. (2) Rules that provide simple in-process feedback about a process stage based on the defects associated with that stage. We discuss how inferences can be made, with and without historical information for the process, and illustrate application of the inference technique to the software production process. (3) An implementation of the rules using a statistical programming language.

It has been noted that software localization does not always fit well into agile software development. This poster aims to illustrate the relationship between the two by examining how localization issues occur in agile projects. A list of common localization issues is presented and examined as to where and why they can be caused during development and if there is a connection to agile methodologies. The poster serves as an introduction to our research in this area.

Bridging knowledge boundaries among project team members is essential to prevent delays or complete failure of software development projects. Prior researchers have reported that software prototypes can be used to help bridge knowledge boundaries between team members in traditional software development settings, yet their use in an agile development setting remains unexplored. Agile development centers the interactions between team members on emerging representations of the prototype whose properties are prone to change over time. Therefore, we conducted an in‐depth study of an agile development project to enhance our understanding on how software prototypes are used as boundary objects in a distributed team setting. Our analyses of team member interactions during 46 virtual meetings that took place over a period of 6 months revealed four different prototype use practices (exemplifying, contrasting, relating, framing) that were effective in bridging syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic knowledge boundaries. We also provide empirically grounded evidence of how variations in object properties can afford different use practices, how the use practices take advantage of these properties, and how object properties are reshaped through these use practices as different types of knowledge boundaries are bridged. These findings bear important implications for research on prototypes as boundary objects in software development in particular and boundary object use in general.

Throughout the automotive industry, the direction of projects being developed using Agile methodologies is growing while the demand from the original equipment manufacturers to follow quality standards such as automotive SPICE is also growing and becoming a normal quality requirement for all the automotive suppliers to achieve. The integration of Automotive SPICE (ASPICE) into agile development projects poses unique challenges and opportunities. This paper explores these challenges, such as documentation overhead, synchronization issues, and cultural mismatches, and presents potential solutions through strategic alignment of ASPICE practices with agile frameworks. This paper also outlines strategies to align ASPICE processes with agile methodologies, aiming to enhance software quality, compliance, and team agility. Key focus areas include process tailoring, capability level alignment, and hybrid model implementations. Figures and tables illustrate key conflict areas and resolutions.

This research examines the impact of agile project management on organisations. To investigate this issue, a case study and an additional external survey were conducted. The impact has been identified according to the aggregated enterprise agility dimensions, which are interconnected. Based on the survey, it can be stated that the impact depends on the number of interfaces into the organisation and the management commitment. The impact, however, can be a double-edged sword, as when the agile mindset is fostered, conflicts can arise when people are released, after agile projects, back into the old structures of the organisation. The survey also revealed that practitioners believe that after an agile project, there is the need for an agile support team in order to avoid a break in the agile supply chain. Furthermore, agile project management impacts the HR-processes, as the competence profiles of the employees are influenced. Consequently, agile project management can be seen as the gem cell for agility in (parts of) an organisation, whether this is wanted or not, due to its influence. Depending on the amount of agile project work, the organisation has to handle the VUCA-environment accordingly, where agile project management can help to learn and transfer agility into the organisation step by step until the desired and required need. Nonetheless, change management should be applied in any cases to ensure the right outcome.

Agile practices have recently gained popularity among large number of companies as a mechanism for reducing cost and increasing ability to handle change in dynamic market conditions. Based on the principles of the Agile manifesto [1, 2], researchers and practitioners have proposed several software development approaches such as Extreme Programming, Scrum and Feature-Driven Development. These and other agile approaches have had significant impact on industrial software development practices. However, there is also a significant concern and perplexity about the role and importance of the issues related to a system’s software architecture, which is considered one of the most important initial design artefacts. It is argued that software architecture is an effective tool to cut development cost and time and to increase the quality of a system. Many practitioners of Agile approaches appear to view software architecture in the context of the plan-driven development paradigm [3]. For them, upfront design and evaluation of software architecture requires too much work, which may have very little value to the customers of a system. Hence, they perceive architectural work as part of high ceremony processes, which usually require large amount of documentation. We maintain that these two seemingly opposing views to software engineering can be integrated but it requires that experts from both fields work together to overcome evident challenges in bridging these two paradigms together. Indeed, software architecture researchers and practitioners appear to believe that sound architectural practices cannot be followed using Agile approaches. However, these two extreme views of Agile and architecture appear to neglect that many agile experts emphasises the importance of paying attention to good design and architecture early in the development process [4, 5]. Recently, there is growing recognition of the importance of paying more attention to architectural aspects in agile approaches [3, 6, 7]. We argue that there is a vital need for devising a research agenda for identifying and dealing with architecture-centric challenges in agile software development. Such research agenda should make it possible to guide the future research on integrating architecture-centric methods in agile approaches and give advice to the software industry on dealing with architecture related challenges. Some of the questions to stimulate discussion in the workshop are: What is the role of software architecture in Agile software development? What are the key architecture-centric challenges and potential solutions in Agile software development projects? What is the strength of the evidence that attention to architectural issues can be counterproductive in Agile development or vice versa? What are the prerequisites for integrating Architecture-Centric methods in agile development and potential implications of such integration?

Large software development projects and programs are increasingly adopting agile development practices. Frameworks for managing large agile development projects is gaining popularity, such as the Scaled Agile Framework and Large Scale Scrum. New challenges arise as agile methods are used in a large-scale context and this raises new questions for research and practice. The fifth workshop on large-scale agile development focused on: Coordination and inter-team coordination of large scale agile development as well as large-scale agile transformations. Based on the workshop presentations and discussions, we propose an updated research agenda for large-scale agile development.