Torgeir Dingsøyr

Empirical studies of agile software development: A systematic review

Agile software development represents a major departure from traditional, plan-based approaches to software engineering. A systematic review of empirical studies of agile software development up to and including 2005 was conducted. The search strategy identified 1996 studies, of which 36 were identified as empirical studies. The studies were grouped into four themes: introduction and adoption, human and social factors, perceptions on agile methods, and comparative studies. The review investigates what is currently known about the benefits and limitations of, and the strength of evidence for, agile methods. Implications for research and practice are presented. The main implication for research is a need for more and better empirical studies of agile software development within a common research agenda. For the industrial readership, the review provides a map of findings, according to topic, that can be compared for relevance to their own settings and situations.

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.

Knowledge management in software engineering: A systematic review of studied concepts, findings and research methods used

Software engineering is knowledge-intensive work, and how to manage software engineering knowledge has received much attention. This systematic review identifies empirical studies of knowledge management initiatives in software engineering, and discusses the concepts studied, the major findings, and the research methods used. Seven hundred and sixty-two articles were identified, of which 68 were studies in an industry context. Of these, 29 were empirical studies and 39 reports of lessons learned. More than half of the empirical studies were case studies. The majority of empirical studies relate to technocratic and behavioural aspects of knowledge management, while there are few studies relating to economic, spatial and cartographic approaches. A finding reported across multiple papers was the need to not focus exclusively on explicit knowledge, but also consider tacit knowledge. We also describe implications for research and for practice.

Applying Systematic Reviews to Diverse Study Types: An Experience Report

Systematic reviews are one of the key building blocks of evidence-based software engineering. Current guidelines for such reviews are, for a large part, based on standard meta-analytic techniques. However, such quantitative techniques have only limited applicability to software engineering research. In this paper, therefore, we describe our experience with an approach to combine diverse study types in a systematic review of empirical research of agile software development.The software engineering research community has been adopting systematic reviews as an unbiased and fair way to assess a research topic. Despite encouraging early results, a systematic review process can be time consuming and hard to conduct. Thus, tools that help on its planning or execution are needed. This article suggests the use of visual text mining (VTM) to aid systematic reviews. A feasibility study was conducted comparing the proposed approach with a manual process. We observed that VTM can contribute to systematic review and we propose a new strategy called VTM-Based systematic review.

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.

Postmortem: never leave a project without it

Postmortem analysis (PMA) is a practical method for initiating knowledge management by capturing experience and improvement suggestions from completed projects. It requires little effort and quickly provides initial results, making it suitable even for small- and medium-size projects and companies. The authors describe their experiences with applying PMA techniques for collecting and analyzing experience in software organizations.

Strength of evidence in systematic reviews in software engineering

Systematic reviews are only as good as the evidence they are based on. It is important, therefore, that users of systematic reviews know how much confidence they can place in the conclusions and recommendations arising from such reviews. In this paper we present an overview of some of the most influential systems for assessing the quality of individual primary studies and for grading the overall strength of a body of evidence. We also present an example of the use of such systems based on a systematic review of empirical studies of agile software development. Our findings suggest that the systems used in other disciplines for grading the strength of evidence for and reporting of systematic reviews, especially those that take account of qualitative and observational studies are of particular relevance for software engineering.

A SURVEY OF CASE STUDIES OF THE USE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

This article examines the literature on case studies of knowledge management systems in use in organisations that develop software. We investigate knowledge management approaches in eight case studies, and what the reported benefits are. Surprisingly, very few organisations claim to have lowered software production costs or increased the quality of the software. But many claim to have improved the work situation for software developers and managers.

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.

Postmortem reviews: purpose and approaches in software engineering

Conducting postmortems is a simple and practical method for organisational learning. Yet, not many companies have implemented such practices, and in a survey, few expressed satisfaction with how postmortems were conducted. In this article, we discuss the importance of postmortem reviews as a method for knowledge sharing in software projects, and give an overview of known such processes in the field of software engineering. In particular, we present three lightweight methods for conducting postmortems found in the literature, and discuss what criteria companies should use in defining their way of conducting postmortems.