Matthias Book

Seeing the forest and the trees: focusing team interaction on value and effort drivers

Large-scale information system development is often plagued by defects and deadline overruns that can be traced to insufficient communication within the project team, particularly between stakeholders from the business, technical and management side. Although agile process models put a strong emphasis on team communication, they provide only little support for focusing the communication on the most relevant issues. We therefore introduce the concept of so-called interaction rooms, where teams work with a pragmatic combination of model sketches and annotations to foster understanding of the system and its business domain, to reveal risks and uncertainties, and discuss those system aspects that are most critical for project success.

Reducing complexity using an interaction room: an experience report

Large-scale information system evolution projects often place high demands on both business and technical stakeholders cognitive and communication skills. Especially if the need for evolution is not confined to a particular feature, but affects the whole value chain, finding dependencies and interrelationships between processes and components is challenging as it requires cross-departmental understanding. These issues can be even more challenging for management stakeholders who need to make high-level and far-reaching decisions on implementation strategies despite not being deeply involved in the technical details. One of the main problems in such projects is that the stakeholders who have expert knowledge typically have only little methodical experience, while the method experts lack the business experience. In this paper, we report on experiences and lessons from a large systems evolution project in a German insurance company, where we applied a new approach -- the so-called Interaction Room -- to improve stakeholders understanding of the projects risks and dependencies in a pragmatic way, without overwhelming them with a heavyweight analysis method.

An exploratory study of contribution barriers experienced by newcomers to open source software projects

Contributing to a Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) project is not a trivial task even for experienced developers: Beyond the effort required for understanding and editing a projects source code for ones own purposes, submitting the changes back to the community requires additional motivation, time, and social and technical effort. Although several surveys have examined the dynamics driving FLOSS contributors, most focus either on the motivations of core developers or indicators of potential long-term commitment, i.e. the small but quite involved and visible minority at the core of a project. Our survey in contrast examines the experiences of the much larger, but nearly invisible group of developers who are just making and submitting their first patch, and identifies barriers that hinder or even prevent them from making a valuable contribution.

Value-Based Migration of Legacy Data Structures

The maintenance and evolution of legacy applications and legacy data structures poses a significant challenge for many organizations that rely on large-scale information systems, e.g. in the financial services domain: Not only is the budget for modernizations that add more technical stability and flexibility than business functionality often slim, but it is also difficult to understand and design the best migration strategies for a large and organically grown system landscape. We report on the experiences from a migration project at a large bank that pursued a value-based approach, in which migration efforts were first focused on a small set of business processes that were identified as most crucial for the enterprise. The migration strategies developed and validated in this pilot phase could later be successfully applied to the larger system landscape.

Automated versioning and temporal navigation for model sketches on large interactive displays

The development of complex software systems requires the collaboration and mutual understanding of stakeholders from various backgrounds, which is usually facilitated by joint design of complex graphical models. To support this collaboration, we introduce the concept of a so-called Augmented Interaction Room that is equipped with large interactive wall displays, each dedicated to a particular modeling perspective. These models evolve significantly over the project life-cycle as uncertainties are resolved and design decisions are made. Our focus in this paper is to help stakeholders obtain a clearer view of the models evolution and past design rationales, without incurring significant cognitive effort for navigating a potentially very long and detailed model revision history. For this purpose, we describe mechanisms for storing the history of the continuously evolving models, and methods for temporal navigation that semi-automatically identify particularly relevant past model versions.

Supporting collaboration of heterogeneous teams in an augmented team room

It is often difficult for a team of stakeholders with heterogeneous backgrounds to maintain a common understanding of a system’s structure and the challenges in its implementation. Thus, especially in complex software projects, risks and inconsistencies are easily overlooked. In this paper, we present the concept of an Augmented Interaction Room (AugIR), i.e. a physical team room whose walls are outfitted with wall-sized touchscreens that visualize different aspects of a software system in the form of various model sketches. These sketches can be annotated by the stakeholders in order to explicitly mark important elements or indicate aspects that are critical for project success. The AugIR strives to support the collaborative work of heterogeneous teams and especially targets the inclusion of non-technical stakeholders into the communication process. Therefore, the AugIR continuously monitors the stakeholders’ design and modeling activities and analyzes the relationships between annotated contents to automatically uncover inconsistencies, contradictions and hidden potential project risks.

Managing and tracing the traversal of process clouds with templates, agendas and artifacts

In many domains, we find tasks for which no strict process can be prescribed, but which require the expertise of case managers who work with information from a broad set of sources. To support case managers highly individual work in such so-called process clouds, we present an approach that enables them to structure their work along any suitable mix of keywords, activities and artifacts.

Facilitating Task Breakdown in Sprint Planning Meeting 2 with an Interaction Room: An Experience Report

In a large industry project that followed an agile approach based on the Scrum method, we found that the team often struggled with breaking coarse product backlog items down into the detailed tasks that had to be completed in a sprint. The teams understanding of the backlog items business and technical implications and dependencies seemed not deep enough to identify all necessary tasks, so in addition to the tasks defined in the sprint planning meeting prescribed by Scrum, an average of 26% of additional tasks was identified later over the course of each sprint, making any attempt at progress estimation or risk management very difficult. To counter this effect and support the teams understanding of backlog items right from the beginning of each sprint, we introduced a pragmatic method to analyze backlog items more comprehensively and thus support a more complete and reliable task breakdown. We consequently found that the effectiveness and precision of task breakdowns has improved significantly in the project.

Risk-aware Migration of Legacy Data Structures

The maintenance and evolution of legacy applications and legacy data structures poses a significant challenge for many organizations that rely on large-scale information systems, e.g. in the financial services domain: Not only is the budget for modernizations that add more technical stability and flexibility than business functionality often slim, but it is also difficult to understand and design the best migration strategies for a large and grown system landscape. We report on the experiences from a migration project at a large bank that pursued a value-based approach, in which migration efforts were first focused on a small set of business processes that were identified as most crucial for the enterprise. The migration strategies developed and validated in this pilot phase could later be successfully applied to the larger system landscape.

Towards recovering and maintaining trace links for model sketches across interactive displays

In complex software projects, it is often difficult for a team of stakeholders with heterogeneous backgrounds to maintain a common understanding of the systems structure and the challenges in its implementation. In this paper, we therefore introduce the concept of an augmented “Interaction Room”, i.e. a physical room whose walls are outfitted with wall-sized touchscreens that visualize different aspects of a software system. The information displayed on the walls is related, so when a user changes the content on one wall, e.g. by editing or navigating a diagram, the contents on the other walls should change correspondingly. This raises the need for traceability techniques to recover trace links between the walls and to maintain them in real-time. In contrast to how one works with existing modeling tools, the pragmatic methodology of the Interaction Room encourages users to work with sketches that may often remain incomplete and inconsistent. This makes the identification and maintenance of trace links particularly difficult. We therefore describe how a combination of prospective and retrospective traceability techniques can be used to recover and maintain the trace links in such an interactive room.