Lise Tordrup Heeager

How e-government managers prioritise rival value positions: The efficiency imperative

E-Government strategies, investments, project selection, and implementations are influenced by value positionsdeeply enshrined in the traditions of public administration, which are in turn reflected in the everyday discourse of publicmanagers. We analyse value traditions in the public administration literature and their adaptation for e-Government and synthesise three prominent positions. Administrative efficiency focuses on cost-effectiveness logics highlighted by New Public Management thinking. Service improvement, derived from the tradition of public service, emphasises the provision of better services for citizens. Citizen engagement, with its roots in liberal democracy arguments, promotes responsiveness, consultation, collaboration and participation. A set of foundational values grounded in the deeply rooted bureaucratic tradition is also distinguished. A qualitative survey of Danish local authority managers’ value positions shows a heavy bias towards administrative efficiency and an absence of concern for citizen engagement. The implications of this efficiency imperative are discussed.

Introducing Agile Practices in a Documentation-Driven Software Development Practice: A Case Study

Abstract The agile and the documentation-driven software methods advocate two different ways of developing software; but research does show some compatibility between these. Practitioners have an increasing desire to adopt agile software development methods while still being compliant with a quality assurance standard. However, due to little empirical research documenting software practices that meshes the agile and the documentation-driven methods, it is not well understood how to do this. This paper presents a case study of a software development practice in a pharmaceutical organization. For market reasons the organization had to comply with the US Food and Drug Administration standard. At the same time significant parts of the agile method Scrum had been implemented by the software group. The purpose of this paper was to understand the possibility of implementing a software development practice that meshes the agile and the documentation-driven methods and the challenges of doing this. This case study supports the previous literature and shows that it is possible to implement a software development practice, that meshes the agile and the documentation-driven methods. But, it also showed that doing so is not straight forward. It showed that meshing the project characteristics: ‘developers’, ‘requirements’, ‘testing’ and ‘customer-relations’ was especially difficult.

Optimising agile development practices for the maintenance operation: nine heuristics

Agile methods are widely used and successful in many development situations and beginning to attract attention amongst the software maintenance community – both researchers and practitioners. However, it should not be assumed that implementing a well-known agile method for a maintenance department is therefore a trivial endeavour - the maintenance operation differs in some, important respects from development work. Classical accounts of software maintenance emphasise more traditional software engineering processes, whereas recent research accounts of agile maintenance efforts uncritically focus on benefits. In an action research project at Aveva in Denmark we assisted with the optimisation of SCRUM, tailoring the standard process to the immediate needs of the developers. We draw on both theoretical and empirical learning to formulate seven heuristics for maintenance practitioners wishing to go agile.

The Agile and the Disciplined Software Approaches: Combinable or Just Compatible?

Offhand, the agile and the disciplined software development approaches seem contradicting. More and more, software development organizations however strive at implementing an agile software development approach while still being compliant to a quality assurance standard. Researchers are discussing the combinability and compatibility of these two approaches. Through a review of the literature, the purpose of this chapter is to determine whether the agile and the disciplined software development approaches are combinable or just compatible, in particular to identify the main challenges of using an agile software development approach in a disciplined setting. The review shows that the agile and the disciplined approaches are compatible, but not combinable. It is possible to implement agile practices and principles in a development process compliant with a quality standard, but the regulations of the standard makes it impossible to implement a full agile software development process without compromising the agility. The main challenges, when balancing the agility and discipline in a project, are how to determine the right level of documentation and how to overcome the differences in the way requirements are handled.

Agile software development and the barriers to transfer of knowledge: An interpretive case study

Agile practices to systems development are believed to depend largely on the developers’ competences, experience and knowledge and to a lesser degree on formal development processes and methods. In this paper we investigate the knowledge transfer and barriers to the transfer of agile development practices in an interpretive case study. The case company is a pharmaceutical firm where we studied how they develop software and how they transfer their own experience. Based on the literature we develop an initial framework of barriers to knowledge transfer and apply it to interpret the case study. From this case study we are able to discuss the initial framework and extend it to a framework of knowledge transfer of agile practices. The framework provides a better understanding of the barriers to knowledge transfer of agile practices. The paper contributes with (1) an application of the framework to explain knowledge transfer and barriers, and (2) specifically explicate potential barriers hindering knowledge transfer of agile practices. This has implications for the implementation of agile development practices.

How can agile and documentation-driven methods be meshed in practice?

Agile methods are becoming increasingly popular in software development; even by organizations complying with quality standards. The literature reports on scattered examples of organizations that have succeeded in meshing agile and documentation-driven methods. However, due to a lack of empirical research, it is not well understood how to implement a meshed software development practice. To increase the understanding of how to do this, this paper presents two case studies of the development of safety-critical software. The first case study presents challenges of adopting quality assurance in an agile software practice. The second case study shows how agile practices are adopted in a documentation-driven practice compliant with the US Food and Drug Administration standard. Based on a framework that identifies nine practice areas in which the methods differ, the challenges of and possibilities in implementing a meshed software development practice is presented.

A conceptual model of agile software development in a safety-critical context: A systematic literature review

Abstract Context Safety-critical software systems are increasingly being used in new application areas, such as personal medical devices, traffic control, and detection of pathogens. A current research debate is regarding whether safety-critical systems are better developed with traditional waterfall processes or agile processes that are purportedly faster and promise to lead to better products. Objective To identify the issues and disputes in agile development of safety-critical software and the key qualities as found in the extant research literature. Method We conducted a systematic literature review as an interpretive study following a research design to search, assess, extract, group, and understand the results of the found studies. Results There are key issues and propositions that we elicit from the literature and combine into a conceptual model for understanding the foundational challenges of agile software development of safety-critical systems. The conceptual model consists of four problematic practice areas and five relationships, which we find to be even more important than the problematic areas. From this review, we suggest that there are important research gaps that need to be investigated. Conclusions We suggest that future research should have a primary focus on the relationships in the resulting conceptual model and specifically on the dynamics of the field as a whole, on incremental versus iterative development, and on how to create value with minimal but sufficient effort.

The dynamics of agile practices for safety-critical software development

This short paper reports from a case study of the agile development of safety-critical software. It utilizes a framework of dynamic relationships between agile practices with the purpose of demonstrating the utility of the framework to understand a case in its context, and it shows significant dynamics. The study is concluded by pointing at which further research on the framework is required to use the framework in managing the agile development of safety-critical software.

Adopting Quality Assurance Technology in Customer–Vendor Relationships: A Case Study of How Interorganizational Relationships Influence the Process

Quality assurance technology is a formal control mechanism aiming at increasing the quality of the product exchanged between vendors and customers. Studies of the adoption of this technology in the field of system development rarely focus on the role of the relationship between the customer and vendor in the process. We have studied how the process of adopting quality assurance technology by a small Danish IT vendor developing pharmacy software for a customer in the public sector was influenced by the relationship with the customer. The case study showed that the adoption process was shaped to a high degree by the relationship and vice versa. The prior high level of trust and mutual knowledge helped the parties negotiate mutually feasible solutions throughout the adoption process. We thus advise enhancing trust-building processes to strengthen the relationships and to balance formal control and social control to increase the likelihood of a successful outcome of the adoption of quality assurance technology in a customer–vendor relationship.