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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.

Agile methods rapidly replacing traditional methods at Nokia: A survey of opinions on agile transformation

Context: Many organizations have started to deploy agile methods, but so far there exist only a few studies on organization-wide transformations. Are agile methods here to stay? Some claim that agile software development methods are in the mainstream adoption phase in the software industry, while others hope that those are a passing fad. The assumption here is that if agile would not provide real improvement, adopters would be eager at first but turn pessimistic after putting it into practice. Objective: Despite the growing amount of anecdotal evidence on the success of agile methods across a wide range of different real-life development settings, scientific studies remain scarce. Even less is known about the perception of the impacts of agile transformation when it is deployed in a very large software development environment, and whether agile methods are here to stay. This study aims to fill that gap by providing evidence from a large-scale agile transformation within Nokia. While we have yet to confirm these findings with solid quantitative data, we believe that the perception of the impacts already pinpoints the direction of the impacts of large-scale agile transformation. Method: The data were collected using a questionnaire. The population of the study contains more than 1000 respondents in seven different countries in Europe, North America, and Asia. Results: The results reveal that most respondents agree on all accounts with the generally claimed benefits of agile methods. These benefits include higher satisfaction, a feeling of effectiveness, increased quality and transparency, increased autonomy and happiness, and earlier detection of defects. Finally, 60% of respondents would not like to return to the old way of working. Conclusion: While the perception of the impact of agile methods is predominantly positive, several challenge areas were discovered. However, based on this study, agile methods are here to stay.

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.

Integrating agile software development and software process improvement: a longitudinal case study

Agile software development solutions are targeted at enhancing work at project level. Little is yet known about the relationship between agile projects and organizational capability improvement. The agile project teams are suggested to iteratively improve their behaviour in a validated manner. This paper addresses the high value of such validated software process improvement (SPI) knowledge emerging from project teams and its utilization at the organizational level SPI. In this paper it is suggested that the novel SPI methods of agile project teams also require alterations in the activities of the organizational level in order to enable the mutually benefiting coexistence of the two. Empirical results from a longitudinal case study over Jive software development projects are presented to illustrate the evolvement of organizational SPI mechanisms and to derive implications for integrating the agile software development and organizational SPI. This study reveals the high importance of close collaboration between the organizational and project levels throughout the projects and identifies several organizational activities needed in enhancing SPI within agile projects and in an organization.

Software product roadmapping in a volatile business environment

Product roadmapping enhances the product development process by enabling early information and long-term decision making about the products in order to deliver the right products to the right markets at the right time. However, relatively little scientific knowledge is available on the application and usefulness of product roadmapping in software product development context. This study develops a framework for software product roadmapping, which is then used to study the critical aspects of the product roadmapping process. The collection of empirical evidence includes both quantitative and qualitative data which sheds further insight into the complexities involved in product roadmapping. Results revealed that organizations view the product roadmap mainly as a tool for strategic decision making as it aims at showing the future directions of the companys products. However, only a few companies appear to have an explicit approach for handling the mechanisms for creating and maintaining such a roadmap. Finally, it is suggested that the strategic importance of product roadmapping is likely to increase in the future and, as a conclusion, a new type of agility is required in order to survive in the turbulent and competitive software business environment.

Exploring Quality Metrics to Support Defect Management Process in a Multi-site Organization - A Case Study

In large software development projects, the number of defects can be considerably high and defect management can become even more challenging when the development is distributed over several sites. Defect reduction solutions and commonly agreed defect management methods are needed to handle the defects and to meet the target quality level of the software, measured by the number of open defects. In this study, a combination of three quality metrics was used to support the defect management process in four consecutive multi-site software development programs involving several hundred people, and the result was compared to a program not using the described quality criteria set. According to the results, defect closing speed was improved, the number of open defects was reduced, and defects were reported earlier in programs that were using the quality metrics.