Minna Pikkarainen

The impact of agile practices on communication in software development

Agile software development practices such as eXtreme Programming (XP) and SCRUM have increasingly been adopted to respond to the challenges of volatile business environments, where the markets and technologies evolve rapidly and present the unexpected. In spite of the encouraging results so far, little is known about how agile practices affect communication. This article presents the results from a study which examined the impact of XP and SCRUM practices on communication within software development teams and within the focal organization. The research was carried out as a case study in F-Secure where two agile software development projects were compared from the communication perspective. The goal of the study is to increase the understanding of communication in the context of agile software development: internally among the developers and project leaders and in the interface between the development team and stakeholders (i.e. customers, testers, other development teams). The study shows that agile practices improve both informal and formal communication. However, it further indicates that, in larger development situations involving multiple external stakeholders, a mismatch of adequate communication mechanisms can sometimes even hinder the communication. The study highlights the fact that hurdles and improvements in the communication process can both affect the feature requirements and task subtask dependencies as described in coordination theory. While the use of SCRUM and some XP practices facilitate team and organizational communication of the dependencies between product features and working tasks, the use of agile practices requires that the team and organization use also additional plan-driven practices to ensure the efficiency of external communication between all the actors of software development.

Assimilation of agile practices in use

Agile method use in information systems development (ISD) has grown dramatically in recent years. The emergence of these alternative approaches was very much industry‐led at the outset, and while agile method research is growing, the vast majority of these studies are descriptive and often lack a strong theoretical and conceptual base. Insights from innovation adoption research can provide a new perspective on analysing agile method use. This paper is based on an exploratory study of the application of the innovation assimilation stages to understand the use of agile practices, focusing in particular on the later stages of assimilation, namely acceptance, routinisation and infusion. Four case studies were conducted, and based on the case study findings, the concepts of acceptance, routinisation and infusion were adapted and applied to agile software development. These adapted concepts were used to glean interesting insights into agile practice use. For example, it was shown that the period of use of agile practices does not have a proportional effect on their assimilation depths. We also reflected on the sequential assumption underlying the assimilation stages, showing that adopting teams do not always move through the assimilation stages in a linear manner.

Strengths and barriers behind the successful agile deployment--insights from the three software intensive companies in Finland

The number of success stories being reported concerning agile software development has led to an increase in interest among industries and research communities. The purpose of this paper is to identify strengths and barriers for ‘successful agile deployment’ in the software companies. This knowledge can benefit software companies planning their current strategy for agile deployment. Analysis of 57 developers, architects, project managers, customers, quality managers, and line and product managers in three case companies identifies 71 strengths and 169 barriers of agile deployment. The analysis revealed the importance of management providing the necessary goals and support for agile development. It also indicated the significance of defining a tailored process model and giving developers the freedom to improve their own agile development process continuously during agile deployment. The identified barriers, strengths and recommendations can be used as a checklist for planning and/or monitoring the effectiveness of agile deployment in software companies. By identifying the barriers and strengths of agile deployment, the paper deepens understanding of this highly relevant but relatively under-researched phenomenon and contributes to the literature on agile deployment and software process improvement.

Deploying agile practices in organizations: a case study

Currently, software development organizations are increasingly interested in adopting agile processes and practices. The organizations, however, need procedures and methods for supporting a systematic selection and deployment of new agile practices and for tailoring them to suit the organizational context. In this paper, an agile deployment framework is proposed. It is compatible with the ideology of continuous improvement of organizational practices (QIP), while it also integrates it with the opportunities provided by short iterations of agile process model. The suggested framework includes the procedures and methods needed for selecting suitable new agile practices in an organization. It also embodies the means for iteratively tailoring and validating the deployed practices within agile projects and gaining feedback rapidly from projects to the organization. The paper presents the empirical experiences of a case study where the F-Secure Corporation deployed a new agile software development process (Mobile-D) in a pilot project in order to utilize its experiences in developing an organization specific agile process model alongside their traditional F-Secure product realization process.

Distributed Agile Development: A Case Study of Customer Communication Challenges

The highly collaborative nature of software development emphasizes the importance of efficient communication. Agile methodologies further accentuate its importance. The importance of communication is further exacerbated in distributed environments due to temporal, geographical and cultural distances. Despite this, little is known about communication in distributed agile development. This results from the case study described in this paper suggest that the efficiency of customer communication is dependent on the nature of the actual customer relationship and the organizational policies. Weak customer relationship and deliberate information hiding may result in inefficient communication and reduced efficiency of the communication media. Thus, in order to enable meaningful communication, establishing an efficient customer relationship can be considered paramount.

An approach for assessing suitability of agile solutions: a case study

Dynamic market situation and changing customer requirements generate more demands for the product development. Product releases should be developed and managed in short iterations answering to the rapid external changes and keeping up a high quality level. Agile practices (such as the best practices in Extreme Programming and Scrum) offer a great way of monitoring and controlling rapid product development cycles and release development. One problem in product development projects, however, is how to apply agile methods and principles as a part of the complex product development. The purpose of this paper is to describe, how Agile Assessment was conducted in a case company in order to support product development and customer support improvement. During the experiment it was found that Agile Assessment is an efficient method to clarify what agile practices are suitable for the organizations product development and customer co-operation. Another finding was that the use of the best suitable agile practices would improve incremental development monitoring and traceability of requirements.

Ahaa --agile, hybrid assessment method for automotive, safety critical smes

The need for software is increasingly growing in the automotive industry. Software development projects are, however, often troubled by time and budget overruns, resulting in systems that do not fulfill customer requirements. Both research and industry lack strategies to combine reducing the long software development lifecycles (as required by time-to-market demands) with increasing the quality of the software developed. Software process improvement (SPI) provides the first step in the move towards software quality, and assessments are a vital part of this process. Unfortunately, software process assessments are often expensive and time consuming. Additionally, they often provide companies with a long list of issues without providing realistic suggestions. The goal of this paper is to describe a new low-overhead assessment method that has been designed specifically for small-to-medium-sized (SMEs) organisations wishing to be automotive software suppliers. This assessment method integrates the structured-ness of the plan-driven SPI models of Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Automotive SPICEtrade with the flexibleness of agile practices.

Combining Agile and Traditional: Customer Communication in Distributed Environment

Distributed development is a radically increasing phenomenon in modern software development environments. At the same time, traditional and agile methodologies and combinations of those are being used in the industry. Agile approaches place a large emphasis on customer communication. However, existing knowledge on customer communication in distributed agile development seems to be lacking. In order to shed light on this topic and provide practical guidelines for companies in distributed agile environments, a qualitative case study was conducted in a large globally distributed software company. The key finding was that it might be difficult for an agile organization to get relevant information from a traditional type of customer organization, even though the customer communication was indicated to be active and utilized via multiple different communication media. Several challenges discussed in this paper referred to “information blackout” indicating the importance of an environment fostering meaningful communication. In order to evaluate if this environment can be created a set of guidelines is proposed.

Challenges and industry practices for managing software variability in small and medium sized enterprises

Software variability is an ability to change (configure, customize, extend) software artefacts (e.g. code, product, domain requirements, models, design, documentation, test cases) for a specific context. Optimized variability management can lead a software company to 1) shorter development lead time, 2) improved customer and improved user satisfaction, 3) reduced complexity of product management (more variability, same

Systematic piloting of agile methods in the large: two cases in embedded systems development

) and 4) reduced costs (same variability, less