Claudia de O. Melo

Agile Team Perceptions of Productivity Factors

In this paper, we investigate agile team perceptions of factors impacting their productivity. Within this overall goal, we also investigate which productivity concept was adopted by the agile teams studied. We here conducted two case studies in the industry and analyzed data from two projects that we followed for six months. From the perspective of agile team members, the three most perceived factors impacting on their productivity were appropriate team composition and allocation, external dependencies, and staff turnover. Teams also mentioned pair programming and collocation as agile practices that impact productivity. As a secondary finding, most team members did not share the same understanding of the concept of productivity. While some known factors still impact agile team productivity, new factors emerged from the interviews as potential productivity factors impacting agile teams.

The evolution of agile software development in Brazil

Agile software development methods have been increasingly adopted worldwide and became one of the mainstream software development approaches. Agile methods have also had an impact on software engineering education with universities adapting their courses to accommodate this new form of software development. Software engineering research has tried to evaluate the impact of agile methods in industrial projects and discover in which situations it is beneficial to apply such methods. However, there are almost no studies focusing on the progress of the agile movement in Brazil. In this paper, we present an overview of the evolution of the agile movement in Brazil, outlining the history of its first advocates in academia and industry. We describe existing educational initiatives, discuss the impact of the agile development on the national research, and present a report on the agile state-of-the-practice in the Brazilian IT industry.

Agile Usability Patterns for UCD Early Stages

The integration between agile methods and UCD has been addressed by several authors in recent years. However, a gap remains regarding how the practices have been described, lacking a standard that both designers and agile practitioners can understand and apply.

Genesis and Evolution of the Agile Movement in Brazil -- Perspective from Academia and Industry

Agile software development methods have been increasingly adopted worldwide and became one of the mainstream software development approaches. Agile methods have also had an impact on software engineering education with universities adapting their courses to accommodate this new point of view of software development. Software engineering research has tried to evaluate the impact of agile methods in industrial projects and discover in which situations it is beneficial to apply such methods. However, there are still few studies focusing on the progress of the Agile Movement in Brazil.In this paper, we present an overview of the evolution of the Agile Movement in Brazil, outlining the history of its first advocates in academia and industry. We also describe existing educational initiatives and the impact of agile development on the national research and present a report on the agile state-of- the-practice in the Brazilian IT industry.

Understanding the UX designer's role within agile teams

User-Centered Design spends a considerable effort on research and analysis before development begins. On the other hand, Agile methods strive to deliver small sets of software features to customers as fast as possible in short iterations. Whereas the two methodologies have tensions regarding requirements gathering and upfront design, they also share similarities. For instance, both approaches are iterative and customer focused. However, there is little guidance on how to integrate these two perspectives and a lack of understanding with respect to the User Experience (UX) Designers role in an agile environment. Based on four ethnographically-informed studies in two large companies, we aim at providing a better understanding of the integration of Agile development and UX Design by describing the different roles that a UX Designer plays within an Agile environment.

Brazil and the Emerging Future of Software Engineering

Claudia Melo, Ronaldo Ferraz, and Rebecca Parsons from ThoughtWorks share their views of software engineerings future from a Brazilian perspective. This invited essay is part of a special issue on the Future of Software Engineering.

Relations Between Actions Performed by Users and Their Engagement.

Although Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) increasingly encourage users to assist in the curation of online collections through open collaboration systems, measuring users’ engagement in these systems is a dynamic and complex challenge. We analyzed 18 user’s actions over 20 days according to the User Engagement Scale (UES) and based on Maximal Repeating Patterns (MRPs) and correlations between user interaction elements and dimensions of user engagement (focused attention, perceived usability, aesthetics, and reward). Our results show differences in usage tactics for users with high, medium, and low scores from UES, and monotonically increasing moderate correlations between perceived usability scores and game design elements. Additionally, we found that the longer the mean time interval between two consecutive user actions during a usage period lasted, the higher the UES score was. These results help to understand what influences user engagement, isolating the effects of user interaction elements.

Improving Engagement Metrics in an Open Collaboration Community Through Notification: An Online Field Experiment

Open collaboration communities depend on contributors. To foster users’ engagement with collaborative systems, it is necessary to consider features related to engagement attributes, such as awareness, control, novelty, and feedback, among others. However, it is not trivial to develop a feature that effectively improves engagement, considering specific contexts. This study analyzes the notification feature with respect to its effectiveness on increasing users’ engagement in open collaboration communities. We conducted an online field experiment in a real setting, analyzing the engagement of two homogeneous user groups: pre- and post-implementation of a notification feature. We measured users’ engagement using recency, frequency, duration, virality, and ratings metrics. There was an improvement in frequency, recency, and duration of users after inserting the notification feature. Considering the virality metric, there were changes in the behavior of users that accessed the notification interface, but there was neither influence of the notification on the virality metric from accesses through Facebook or Google+, nor on the ratings from comments and evaluations of system contents. Our results indicate an improvement of the user’s engagement, as four of the five engagement metrics had positive results.

Empirical Evaluation of Agile Practices Impact on Team Productivity

Agile methods have become more popular since the early 2000s and, in some cases, can offer better results for software development projects when compared to traditional approaches. Agile methods promise to achieve high productivity and to deliver high-quality software, attracting the attention of companies, which demand ever-higher development speed and quality in their products.