Nils Brede Moe

A decade of agile methodologies

Ever since the agile manifesto was created in 2001, the research community has devoted a great deal of attention to agile software development. This article examines publications and citations to illustrate how the research on agile has progressed in the 10 years following the articulation of the manifesto. Specifically, we delineate the conceptual structure underlying agile scholarship by performing an analysis of authors who have made notable contributions to the field. Further, we summarize prior research and introduce contributions in this special issue on agile software development. We conclude by discussing directions for future research and urging agile researchers to embrace a theory-based approach in their scholarship.

A teamwork model for understanding an agile team: A case study of a Scrum project

Context: Software development depends significantly on team performance, as does any process that involves human interaction. Objective: Most current development methods argue that teams should self-manage. Our objective is thus to provide a better understanding of the nature of self-managing agile teams, and the teamwork challenges that arise when introducing such teams. Method: We conducted extensive fieldwork for 9months in a software development company that introduced Scrum. We focused on the human sensemaking, on how mechanisms of teamwork were understood by the people involved. Results: We describe a project through Dickinson and McIntyres teamwork model, focusing on the interrelations between essential teamwork components. Problems with team orientation, team leadership and coordination in addition to highly specialized skills and corresponding division of work were important barriers for achieving team effectiveness. Conclusion: Transitioning from individual work to self-managing teams requires a reorientation not only by developers but also by management. This transition takes time and resources, but should not be neglected. In addition to Dickinson and McIntyres teamwork components, we found trust and shared mental models to be of fundamental importance.

Challenges of shared decision-making: A multiple case study of agile software development

Context: Agile software development changes the nature of collaboration, coordination, and communication in software projects. Objective: Our objective was to understand the challenges of shared decision-making in agile software development teams. Method: We designed a multiple case study consisting of four projects in two software product companies that recently adopted Scrum. We collected data in semi-structured interviews, through participant observations, and from process artifacts. Results: We identified three main challenges to shared decision-making in agile software development: alignment of strategic product plans with iteration plans, allocation of development resources, and performing development and maintenance tasks in teams. Conclusion: Agile software development requires alignment of decisions on the strategic, tactical, and operational levels in order to overcome these challenges. Agile development also requires a transition from specialized skills to redundancy of functions and from rational to naturalistic decision-making. This takes time; the case companies needed from one to two years to change from traditional, hierarchical decision-making to shared decision-making in software development projects.

Understanding Self-Organizing Teams in Agile Software Development

Traditional software teams consist of independently focused self-managing professionals with high individual but low team autonomy. A challenge with introducing agile software development is that it requires a high level of both individual and team autonomy. This paper studies the barriers with introducing self-organizing teams in agile software development and presents data from a seven month ethnographic study of professional developers in a Scrum team. We found the most important barrier to be the highly specialized skills of the developers and the corresponding division of work. In addition we found a lack of system for team support, and reduced external autonomy to be important barriers for introducing self- organizing teams. These findings have implications for software development managers and practitioners.

Research challenges in large-scale agile software development

Agile software development methods are increasingly used in large-scale software development. This article summarizes some of the discussion on research challenges in large-scale agile development at a workshop at the International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP2013), in the form of a research agenda.

Transition from a plan-driven process to Scrum: a longitudinal case study on software quality

Although Scrum is an important topic in software engineering and information systems, few longitudinal industrial studies have investigated the effects of Scrum on software quality, in terms of defects and defect density, and the quality assurance process. In this paper we report on a longitudinal study in which we have followed a project over a three-year period. We compared software quality assurance processes and software defects of the project between a 17-month phase with a plan-driven process, followed by a 20-month phase with Scrum. The results of the study did not show a significant reduction of defect densities or changes of defect profiles after Scrum was used. However, the iterative nature of Scrum resulted in constant system and acceptance testing and related defect fixing, which made the development process more efficient in terms of fewer surprises and better control of software quality and release date. In addition, software quality and knowledge sharing got more focus when using Scrum. However, Scrum put more stress and time pressure on the developers, and made them reluctant to perform certain tasks for later maintenance, such as refactoring.

Scrum and Team Effectiveness: Theory and Practice

The scrum software development process has recently gained much popularity as an agile method primarily focusing on project management. Scrum has been derived as a set of principles of good management of software projects, from experienced practitioners. In this paper, we discuss the elements of Scrum in relation to a proposed theory of the “big five” components for effectiveness in small teams. We also discuss the theory of scrum in relation to these components, and in relation to a case study of a start-up Scrum team.

Augmenting Experience Reports with Lightweight Postmortem Reviews

Many small and medium-sized companies that develop software experience the same problems repeatedly, and have few systems in place to learn from their own mistakes as well as their own successes. Here, we propose a lightweight method to collect experience from completed software projects, and compare the results of this method to more widely applied experience reports. We find that the new method captures more information about core processes related to software development in contrast to experience reports that focus more on management processes.

Understanding lacking trust in global software teams: a multi-case study

Many organizations have turned toward globally distributed software development in their quest for higher-quality software delivered cheaply and quickly. But this kind of development has often been reported as problematic and complex to manage. One of the fundamental factors in determining the success and failure of globally distributed software teams is trust. The aim of our work has therefore been to describe the key factors causing lack of trust, and the main effects of lacking trust in such teams. From studying 4 projects, all located in two different countries, with trust problems we found the key factors to be poor socialization and socio-cultural fit, lack of face-to-face meetings, missing conflict handling and cognitive based trust, increased monitoring and too little communication. The effect of lacking trust was a decrease in productivity, quality, information exchange, feedback and morale among the employees; the monitoring increased and the employees doubted negative feedback from manager.

Towards principles of large-scale agile development: A summary of the workshop at XP2014 and a revised research Agenda

Large projects are increasingly adopting agile development practices, and this raises new challenges for research. The workshop on principles of large-scale agile development focused on central topics in large-scale: the role of architecture, inter-team coordination, portfolio management and scaling agile practices. We propose eight principles for large-scale agile development, and present a revised research agenda.