Stavros Stavru

A critical examination of recent industrial surveys on agile method usage

Abstract Context Practitioners and researchers often claim that agile methods have moved into the mainstream for the last few years. To support this claim they refer to recent industrial surveys which tend to report high rates of agile method usage. However many of these industrial surveys are conducted by agile consultants, tool vendors, professional societies and independent technology and market research organizations. This raises some important concerns about the possible conflict of interest and the overall trustworthiness of these studies. Objective In response to the above concerns, a secondary study was carried out. Its objective was to examine industrial surveys published in 2011 and 2012, determine the extent to which we could trust their reported high rates of agile method usage and provide recommendations on how quality of research could be improved in the future. Method Following a rigorous search procedure, nine industrial surveys on agile method usage published in 2011 and 2012 were extracted from both academia and industry. Their thoroughness in reporting and trustworthiness were evaluated using a newly proposed assessment framework based on Gubas four attributes of trustworthiness (truth value, applicability, consistency and neutrality) and a number of methods for assessing survey research in related fields as information, communication and management studies. Results The careful examination of the reviewed surveys shows that most of the studies have insufficient thoroughness in reporting and (subsequently) low trustworthiness. Only one (out of nine) study is considered as a scientific contribution in determining the current 2011/2012 rate of agile method usage. Conclusions The obtained results support our initial considerations about the trustworthiness of recent industrial surveys on agile method usage and suggest a number of recommendations for increasing the quality and value of future survey research in this regard.

Challenges for Migrating to the Service Cloud Paradigm: An Agile Perspective

Migrating to the Service Cloud Paradigm implies the migration of legacy software systems to a service-oriented architecture with deployment in the cloud. Although this specific software modernization paradigm promises numerous strategic and operational advantages, it poses also many complex organizational and technical challenges, among which is the lack of mature processes, methods and techniques. This paper examines the questions of whether agile methods and techniques could be scaled to fit the migration to the Service Cloud Paradigm and how they could help overcoming the challenges of software modernization in this specific context. The research methodology presented here first extracts the challenges of the migration to Service Cloud Paradigm through a systematic literature review and then, using expert judgment, evaluates how different agile techniques, taken from Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP), could address the identified challenges. As a result, a ranked list of applicable agile techniques is presented and suggestions for their adoption in software modernization projects are drawn.

Organizational Values and Agile Methods Deployment

This paper outlines an ongoing empirical study on the relationship between organizational values and the deployment of agile methods. Organizational values are interpreted as preferred organizational qualities and standards which guide organizational decisions and behavior. They have been shown to have significant impact on different aspect of organizational life, including organizational commitment, performance, integrity and many more. Agile methods deployment is referred as the process that occurs when agile methods are taken into use. Many determinants of agile methods acceptance and usage have been proposed and empirically evaluated. Nevertheless, organizational values have never been thoroughly examined in this regard. Our study aims to fill this gap and claims that certain attributes of organizational values correlate with the successful deployment of agile methods.

Managing change in self-adaptive software systems

Self-adaptive software systems are expected to deal with change during their execution with limited or no human interaction. Therefore a better understanding of change and how it could be managed is a crucial step for achieving self-adaptation. Most of the research in self-adaptive software systems is focused on managing change, which is critical for the system in terms of sustaining its efficiency and operation. The work in this paper takes new direction and introduces the idea of exploratory change, heavily used in many other disciplines to successfully achieve self-adaptation. It proposes a new classification model of change in self-adaptive software systems, which extends the existing taxonomies in the research literature with five new criteria: change motif, change trigger, change adoption, change frequency and change speed. The purpose of this classification model is to aid the distinction between three different approaches for self-adaptation: exploitative, exploratory and mixed approaches.

Agile and the Global Software Leaders: A Perfect Match?

The presented study examines the prevailing espoused values of some of the most successful software organizations and evaluates the extent to which they are promoted in the agile ideology. Its objective is to determine the level of value congruence and whether it could be used to further explain the widespread adoption of agile software development. Its findings reveal a perfect match between the prevailing espoused values of the examined global software leaders and the agile ideology, and suggest that the popularity of the agile methods might be explained through their capability to increase customer value, facilitate collaboration and teamwork, secure continuous improvement and ensure high quality of delivered products and services.

Exploratory Self-Adaptation in Software Systems

This paper applies the concept of exploratory change to self-adaptive software systems and proposes and briefly specifies a new paradigm for self-adaptation named exploratory self-adaptation. In exploratory self-adaptation exploratory changes are continuously introduced into the software system as hypothetical improvements of its functional characteristics or quality attributes. Once introduced, these changes are evaluated: if the evaluation is positive, they remain and the system has self-adapted, otherwise the changes are rolled back.

Self-Adaptive Software Systems through Exploratory Changes

Most of the research in self-adaptive software systems is concerned with self-adaptation as response to change in its environment, which threatens system’s efficiency and operation. But except for avoiding and resolving system disturbances, there could be another reason for self-adaptation – the reason for exploration. This paper applies the concept of exploratory change to self-adaptive software systems and proposes a new paradigm for self-adaptation named exploratory self-adaptation.