Alexandre J. H. de O. Luna

STATE OF THE ART OF AGILE GOVERNANCE: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Context: Agility at the business level requires Information Technology (IT) environment flexible and customizable, as well as effective and responsive governance in order to deliver value faster, better, and cheaper to the business. Objective: To understand better this context, our paper seeks to investigate how the domain of agile governance has evolved, as well as to derive implications for research and practice. Method: We conducted a systematic review about the state of art of the agile governance up to and including 2013. Our search strategy identified 1992 studies in 10 databases, of which 167 had the potential to answer our research questions. Results: We organized the studies into four major groups: software engineering, enterprise, manufacturing and multidisciplinary; classifying them into 16 emerging categories. As a result, the review provides a convergent definition for agile governance, six metaprinciples, and a map of findings organized by topic and classified by relevance and convergence. Conclusion: The found evidence lead us to believe that agile governance is a relatively new, wide and multidisciplinary area focused on organizational performance and competitiveness that needs to be more intensively studied. Finally, we made improvements and additions to the methodological approach for systematic reviews and qualitative studies.

Agile governance in Information and Communication Technologies: shifting paradigms

This paper presents the basis of the Agile Governance in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which is based on Agile Software Engineering Methodologies principles and values. Its development was done through a systematic review process, supported by Bibliometrics and Scientometrics methods and techniques, where the Critical Success Factors (CSF) of ICT Governance projects and the principles of the Agile Manifesto were analyzed. Next, through an inductive approach, focused on the convergence between the concepts involved, it was analyzed how agile principles could help to minimize the gap between ICT and business. Evidences of their occurrence were taken through a Conceptual Survey Research. As a result, the foundations and concepts of Agile Governance in ICT were defined and, finally, the development of a reference model was proposed as a future work.

GAME: Governance for Agile Management of Enterprises: A Management Model for Agile Governance

Agility at the business and organizational levels presents a challenge for many enterprises. Business agility demands the ability to sense and respond to changes in competitive environments, whereas organizational agility demands the dexterity to sense broader market opportunities and respond with changes that are organization-wide. These challenges require an information and communication technologies (ICT or IT) environment flexible and customizable simultaneously with the coordination across multiple organization units, also demands effective and responsive governance in order to deliver faster, better, and cheaper value to the business. Driven by these challenges, the goals of the candidates PhD thesis is to conceive, define, and evaluate a management model for agile governance on global development environments. Preliminary insights suggest the models format should be a corporative game, applying constructs of gamification, fun theory and game theory, generating a practical approach to facilitate the implementation of a collaborative and adaptive culture, in order to establish relational integration mechanisms as well as a better understanding of how these arrangements can help the organizations to attain greater enterprise agility and support its overall strategy.

Foundations for an Agile Governance Manifesto: a bridge for business agility

Context : People are a key element of change in organizations and its driving force. The need to understand people as an essential and creative component of the structures and processes is a critical success factor for governance initiatives. Objective : Inspired by the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, this paper proposes the Agile Governance Manifesto as a behavioral reference for individuals and teams in order to help implement agile governance in organizations. Method : This proposal emerges as an inductive and structuralist look over the findings from a broad research developed to describe and analyze the agile governance phenomena, supported by several complementary studies: systematic literature review, observation and interaction of professional groups based on social networks, semi structured interviews, and explanatory survey with representative agents of the phenomena under study. Results : We characterize the agile governance phenomena with six meta-principles and nine meta-values are discussed in order to guide future researches and especially to drive practices on agile governance. Conclusion : This proposal is to be used as an instrument to build an appreciative and positive organizational culture in order to pave the way for smoother and gradual adoption of agile governance.

Dealing with Uncertainties in Software Project Management

Nowadays it is noticed that many projects fail, software projects are notoriously disaster prone, not necessarily because of technological failure, but more often due to uncertainties. In their efforts to keep their projects, many project managers are implicitly using similar ideas, though not always formally as the subject proposes. In this article, a qualitative research which was conducted through semi-structured interviews with 25 participants is presented. Among the interviewees there are software project managers and management researchers. The aim of the work is to explore practices, strategies and techniques as well as to provide a set of recommendations to guide managers in order to reduce uncertainties in their projects.

Reflecting, adapting and learning in small software organizations: an action research approach.

Software Engineering activities are context based and carried out by people, within its culture and project actuality. Consequently, it demands a great deal of social relations. In order to better understanding these challenges faced by software development projects, we have had to go beyond the actual mindset, literature and bodies of knowledge. This paper is a result of an empirical research, aligned with evidence-based Software Engineering, about studies conducted on five software development Micro and Small Enterprises in Brazil, during 22 months, between July-2012 and May-2014. We have adopted a participant observer ethnographic study, resulting in intervention based on action research. The interventions happened several times, leading into continuous and constructive process of reflecting and learning. As a result, we have observed the emergence of a practical problem solving culture, from a collaborative immediate situation, which expanding the actors competencies in every cycle of its execution. Although every organization had its own major problem to be dealt with, our findings point out to some common problems and emerging action strategies to handle with these challenges.