Irum Inayat

Studying relevant socio-technical aspects of requirements-driven collaboration in agile teams

Requirements engineering requires intensive collaboration among team members. Agile methods also require constant collaboration among those involved in the project. While working on certain interdependent tasks, team members develop social and technical relationships that instigate socio-technical dependencies. The main goal of our research is to investigate socio-technical aspects that underlie requirements-driven collaboration among agile teams and their influence on project performance. In this paper we present our research approach to achieve such goal and briefly report on preliminary findings. A survey revealed that communication and awareness are the most relevant socio-technical aspects that underlie requirements-driven collaboration in agile teams. Initial findings of a case study aiming to identify requirements-driven collaboration patterns suggest that teams well aware of each other have lesser communication gaps and require lesser rework. Findings will contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between collaboration and performance in agile teams.

Teaching and Learning Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with 3D Game

Game based-learning methods are largely adopted in many academic fields. The multi-dimensional virtual reality based learning games help the learners to understand the problem dynamics effectively and to construct optimal solutions for them. This shows that games help learners in problem solving and enhancing their performance. Still the implementation of game-based learning is new to software engineering learning. Therefore, there is a need to design multi-dimensional game-based learning environments for teaching and learning software engineering courses and to support it with empirical evidence. To fill this research gap, this paper aims to introduce a multi-dimensional (3D) game for learning object-oriented analysis and design course. This game basically emulates the real-world projects handed over to students as a part of object oriented analysis and design course. The empirical investigation showed that by using the proposed 3D game students learned through practical experience and it eventually helped to enhance their learning outcome, knowledge on the concepts of software process, and proved conducive in timely completion of the project.

Patterns of Collaboration Driven by Requirements in Agile Software Development Teams

Context and motivation: Due to their emphasis on communication, agile methods and requirements engineering activities seem to mutually support each other in software development. Question/Problem: But how do agile teams manage the collaboration required to perform requirements related activities, especially when their members work from geographically distributed locations? Principle Ideas/Results: In this paper we investigated the requirements-driven collaboration translated as communication and awareness among agile teams from four distributed projects. We identified some collaboration patterns that are similar to those reported in the literature for the traditional, non-agile teams, but also some more specific to agile teams. For instance, we found that the number of team members involved in actual collaboration is different than the number of assigned members, that little communication exists with members outside the team, and that project managers are still key players in knowledge sharing patterns. We also found that distance does not matter for knowledge management, that familiarity from past projects facilitates awareness, and communication is still an important source of awareness. Contributions: Our results suggest an exploration on the role of project managers as the key players in agile teams. Also, the correlation of distance and communication needs to be investigated in largely distributed agile teams.

Survey of communication and awareness as the most relevant socio-technical aspects of requirements-driven collaboration among software development teams

Requirements engineering is a social process and while working together, stakeholders develop socio-technical relationships. Socio-technical aspects such as communication (information exchange among members) and awareness (knowledge of others) were discussed in literature, but little is known with respect to their role in requirements engineering activities. Therefore, requirements-driven collaboration (RDC), particularly on the relevance of socio-technical aspects, warrants further investigation. The authors aim to fill this gap by conducting a systematic literature review on these two aspects. This review covers planning (defining objectives and search strategy), execution (study search and selection), and interpretation of the findings (results and discussions). Findings revealed more studies on communication than on awareness. Two aspects of communication covered for RDC in literature are: (i) preferred communication medium, and (ii) communication patterns of teams. However, for awareness the aspects affecting awareness and vice versa were studied for RDC. Further investigation indicated the interdependence of awareness and communication and that distance does not affect teams awareness. The authors discuss implications for software practitioners in terms of enhancing their performance by considering the role of information brokers, and identifying central and emergent members etc. Researchers can strengthen the domain by providing more empirical results on interdependence of socio-technical aspects.

Socio-technical aspects of requirements-driven collaboration (RDC) in agile software development methods

Requirements engineering is a collaborative process carried out with the mutual cooperation and coordination of stakeholders. Requirements-driven collaboration is of crucial and utmost importance in case of agile methods, especially for geographically distributed teams. Socio technical aspects have been discussed in literature for collaborative design and group work activities. Similarly this paper describes the socio-technical aspects in context of requirements engineering for agile methods. Precisely, in this paper we have twofold objectives; first we have mapped requirements engineering phases with agile methods workflow and secondly explored the socio-technical aspects of requirements-driven collaboration within agile methods. Thus this paper provides a new dimension of reviewing the socio technical aspects for requirements-driven collaboration and their alignment with agile iterations.