Christina Hansson

How agile are industrial software development practices

Representatives from the agile development movement claim that agile ways of developing software are more fitting to what is actually needed in industrial software development. If this is so, successful industrial software development should already exhibit agile characteristics. This article therefore aims to examine whether that is the case. It presents an analysis of interviews with software developers from five different companies. We asked about concrete projects, both about the project models and the methods used, but also about the real situation in their daily work. Based on the interviews, we describe and then analyze their development practices. The analysis shows that the software providers we interviewed have more agile practices than they might themselves be aware of. However, plans and more formal development models also are well established. The conclusions answer the question posed in the title: It all depends! It depends on which of the different principles you take to judge agility. And it depends on the characteristics not only of the company but also of the individual project.

Making e-government happen everyday co-development of services, citizenship and technology

In a joint research project concerning the use and design of IT in public services, we are using a simple figure of on-going design-oriented interactions to highlight shifting foci on relationships of co-development of services, citizenship and technology. We bring together a number of concrete examples of this on-going everyday co-development, presented from the different perspectives that we, as researchers from different disciplines and traditions, represent in the project. The article explores and discusses working relations of technology production and use that we see as central to what is actually making e-government happen - or not happen. The main challenge in this area, as we see it, concerns making visible, and developing supportive infrastructures for, the continuing local adaptation, development and design in use of integrated IT and public services.

Agile Processes Enhancing User Participation for Small Providers of Off-the-Shelf Software

To survive in today’s competitive software market, software developers must maintain contact with their customers and users and adopt a flexible organization which allows response to feedback and the changing requirements from the use-context. This also requires a software development that enables change proposals and error reports to be acted upon quickly. The present article uses a case study of a flexible development practice which so far has proved to be sustainable and successful to reconsider user involvement and software development practices of small software providers from an agile perspective. Implementing an agile process may allow for competitive flexibility without necessarily jeopardizing quality.

How to Include Users in the Development of Off-the-Shelf Software: A Case for Complementing Participatory Design with Agile Development

This paper describes and discusses a non-traditional approach to participatory design, one which is combined with an agile-like software development process. In this case, the size of the company combined with a distributed population of users has a serious impact on the software development process. The small software company in our study resolves this problem with an unconventional amalgam of participatory design and agile processes which seems to suit their situation. By using different kinds of user participation the small software provider is able to keep in contact with users on a daily basis. Users convey requirements for new functionalities, give feedback and report errors. Users’ feedback and proposals form the basis for further development. The paper relates our observations to other research on participatory design in unconventional settings and discusses the conditions under which agile software development can complement participatory design.

Educational Programs in e-Government – An Active, Practice- and Design-Oriented Network?

In the autumn of 2004 two higher educational programs in e-government will be starting up at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. Each will be the first of its kind in Scandinavia, and both will be offered as net-based education. The interdisciplinary group of researchers developing the educational programs sees the co-construction as the beginning of an active network of competence around higher education, R&D in the e-government area. Participatory Design, as well as ideas about e-government as ongoing co-construction, have inspired us in our work with developing the educational programs.

What Have We Learned from the TANGO Arena for Regional Cooperation Around e-Government in Southern Sweden?

The TANGO e-government arena is a project in Southern Sweden, funded by the Innovative Actions of the European Regional Development Fund. The project is now nearing its end, and we are thus at the stage of reflectively reviewing what has actually been accomplished and how this relates to the original goals of the project. In July 2002, when the project began, the aim was to establish cooperation between the public sector, private enterprise and university-based research in designing public e-services. In cooperating around development of new, integrated services, catering to various categories of users as well as to a growing diversity of mobile technologies, we have aimed towards establishing feedback channels between practice and theory, between use and design, and between different academic disciplines where we see a need to synchronize the models and methods we work with. Our research questions have focused on exploring and managing multi-perspectivity as a resource for design. In this paper we look at how we organized our cooperation around these goals, and attempt to address those basic summing-up-the-project questions; How well have we succeeded? What have we learned in the process?