Agile

Several agile (i.e., lightweight) development methodologies, especially extreme programming (XP), have been argued to be a solution to many of the problems that continue to plague software development projects. The authors provide a useful evaluation of such approaches, including a discussion of the values that underlie the XP methodology.

Lean supply is closely associated with enabling flow and the elimination of wasteful variation within the supply chain. However, lean operations depend on level scheduling, and the growing need to accommodate variety and demand uncertainty has resulted in the emergence of the concept of agility. This paper explores the role of inventory and capacity in accommodating such variation and identifies how TRIZ separation principles and TOC tools may be combined in the integrated development of responsive and efficient supply chains. A detailed apparel industry case study is used to illustrate the application of these concepts and tools.

Context: Software industry has widely adopted Agile software development methods. Agile literature proposes a few key metrics but little is known of the actual metrics use in Agile teams. Objective: The objective of this paper is to increase knowledge of the reasons for and effects of using metrics in industrial Agile development. We focus on the metrics that Agile teams use, rather than the ones used from outside by software engineering researchers. In addition, we analyse the influence of the used metrics. Method: This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) on using metrics in industrial Agile software development. We identified 774 papers, which we reduced to 30 primary studies through our paper selection process.

Agility is herein interpreted as using market knowledge and a virtual corporation to exploit pro"table opportunities in a volatile market place. This requires the slashing of process lead times throughout the chain. However, as we demonstrate in the paper such action is simply not enough to enable agility. Similar steps must also be taken to reduce information lead times, resulting in the concept of the`information enricheda supply chain. Simulation results obtained on realistic models of fashion trade supply chains con"rm the superior agility resulting from information enrichment. The paper concludes with a Route-Map indicating the steps to be taken in achieving supply chain agility in real world scenarios.

Projects combining agile methods with CMMI 1 are more successful in producing higher quality software that more effectively meets customer needs at a faster pace. Systematic Software Engineering works at CMMI level 5 and uses Lean Software Development as a driver for optimizing software processes. Early pilot projects showed productivity on Scrum teams almost twice that of traditional teams. Other projects using a story-based test-driven approach to software development reduced defects in final test by 40%.

With the increasing popularity of Agile Methods, many software organisations are moving away from traditional methods to adopt Agile development methodologies. Instead of being predictive, Agile is rather adaptive and people-focussed. It advocates a small and collaborative team that work closely together. But team size is a factor that is in turn constrained by people factors. When implementing Agile, these key factors are often overlooked. This study aims at identifying the underlying people factors to consider when adopting Agile for a team to be effective. The method used is the study of three different sized Agile teams developing products based on the same technologies and using Scrum. Both objective and subjective measures were used and the results are supported by a survey. The results clearly show that for agile methodologies to work well, it is crucial to select the right people for the right team.

Design is an inherently multidisciplinary endeavor. This raises the question of how to develop systems in ways that can best leverage the perspectives, practices, and knowledge bases of these different areas. Agile software development and usability engineering both address important aspects of system design, but there are tensions between the methods that make them difficult to integrate. This work presents a development approach that draws from extreme programming (XP), a widely practiced agile software development process, and scenariobased design (SBD), an established usability engineering process. It describes three key questions that need to be addressed for agile software development methods and usability engineering practices to work together effectively, and it introduces interface architectures and design representations that can address these questions.

is an agile practice that is widely accepted and advocated by most agile methods and methodologists. In this paper, we report on a post hoc analysis of the results of an IBM team who has sustained use of TDD for five years and over ten releases of a Java-implemented product. The team worked from a design and wrote tests incrementally before or while they wrote code and, in the process, developed a significant asset of automated tests. The IBM team realized sustained quality improvement relative to a pre-TDD project and consistently had defect density below industry standards. As a result, our data indicate that the TDD practice can aid in the production of high quality products. This quality improvement would compensate for the moderate perceived productivity losses. Additionally, our data indicates that the use of TDD may decrease the degree to which code complexity increases as software ages, as measured by cyclomatic complexity metric.

Because of the distance between the dispersed development locations, Global Software Engineering (GSE) is confronted with challenges regarding communication, coordination and control of the development work. At the same time, agile software development is strongly built upon communication between engineers and has proven its benefits, although, mostly on one single site. As such, it might be advantageous to combine GSE with agile development. This blend however is not straightforward since the distributed and agile development approaches might have conflicting convictions. In this paper we will discuss the advantages and challenges of combining GSE with agile development based on a theoretical, literature-based research. The main results presented in this paper are: (i) aspects of agile software development, (ii) benefits and challenges associated with these in relation to GSE, (iii) categories of technological support for agile GSE and (iv) a framework depicting the mutual relations among them.

Through the use of semi structured interviews with medical device software organizations it emerged that medical device software organizations are experiencing difficulties when following plan driven Software Development Life Cycles (SDLC), particularly in the area of requirements management. To attempt to resolve these issues an examination of the non-regulated industry was performed to determine if lessons learned there could be applied to the development of medical device software. This examination revealed that agile methods are being widely adopted in the non-regulated software industry. To learn if agile methods could be adopted when developing medical device software a mapping study was performed which looked for instances of where agile methods have been used in regulated industries and where they have been adopted, to what success. This mapping study revealed that incorporating agile practices with the existing plan driven SDLC is the most favourable choice for medical device software organizations. This research aims to develop a SDLC which has a foundation of a plan driven SDLC which incorporates agile practices which can be followed when developing regulatory compliant software.

During the Bled conferences, Business Models have attracted a lot of attention. The discussion has moved from understanding the core concepts towards designing and implementing business models. Business models have become a common topic, with concepts and approaches becoming main stream, and connected to more generic research approaches and design perspectives, and business model tooling is becoming more important. In this paper, we provide examples of tooling with regard to Business Model road-mapping, Business Model stress-testing, Business models and Agile software development, and Business models and financial tooling. We also illustrate future research by combining Business Model analysis with Enterprise Architecture. The aim of this paper is to show how business model research is Bouwman, De Reuver, Daas, Haaker, Janssen, Iske, Walenkamp 2 complemented by tooling and to develop an outlook for a research agenda that may be relevant to participants to the Bled conference.

This paper examines how XP practice meets the motivational needs of software developers. Interactions with peers have been identified by others as one potential area of (de)motivation but little detail is known. The nature of this motivator, as expressed by software developers themselves, was explored through semi-structured interviews with a high maturity high performing team working on safety critical software applications in a traditional environment. From these interviews, we have identified seven themes which are characteristic indicators of peer motivation. We interrogate observational data from five mature XP teams to consider whether and how these characteristic indicators are present in an XP environment. We find that XP teams in our study had processes in place that supported many of the motivational needs voiced by developers coming from a traditional, heavyweight software development environment. However, the XP environment is at odds with other motivational needs.

Underspecified performance requirements can cause performance issues in a software system. However, a complete, upfront analysis of a software system is difficult, and usually not desirable. We propose an evolutionary model for performance requirements specifications and corresponding validation testing. The principles of the model can be integrated into agile development methods. Using this approach, the performance requirements and test cases can be specified incrementally, without big upfront analysis. We also provide a post hoc examination of a development effort at IBM that had a high focus on performance requirements. The examination indicates that our evolutionary model can be used to specify performance requirements such that the level of detail is commensurate with the nature of the project.

This paper presents a case study on the impact of development processes on the success of globally distributed software projects. The study compares agile (Scrum, XP, etc.) vs. structured (RUP, waterfall) processes to determine if the choice of process impacts: the overall success and economic savings of distributed projects; the importance customers attribute to projects; the motivation of the development teams; and the amount of real-time or asynchronous communication required during project development.

The increasing use of agile methods to develop UIintensive systems has led to a need to find ways of integrating usability into agile teams-reconciling the convergence and divergent points between the two areas. Agile usability researchers at Virginia Tech have partnered with Meridium, Inc. to develop and implement an integrated approach known as eXtreme Scenario-based Design (XSBD). Based on an analysis of core values and principles of both areas, and work from other agile usability researchers we identified four requirements that need to be met for an integrated approach to work effectively. We report on the results of using XSBD to develop a product at Meridium, summarizing how it addresses those requirements and draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the approach-making connections back to core principles of agile usability.

A general understanding of the solar admittance and solar gains incident on the urban fabric is very useful to assess the potential implementation of renewable energies at the scale of the city. The authors propose a tool that uses Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data to automatically derive this information in a fast and accurate way with no need to refer to the construction of complex models of the urban layout. In particular, a complete methodology from the extraction of LIDAR data to the environmental analysis of urban models and the visualization of results is presented. Aim of the work is to establish a process to investigate digital urban models integrating cross-disciplinary competences, like remote sensing, GIS, image processing and urban and environmental studies. Toward this goal, working on several interfaces, tools and datasets was necessary to provide a consequent structure to the introduced methodology. Case study for application was two districts in Geneva (a historical district, and a modern one) where LIDAR data are available. The use of a hybrid approach from raw LIDAR data and vectorial digital maps (GIS data) of roofs footprints derived from a 3-D urban model of the city of Geneva allowed to interpolate a 2.5-D urban surface model (DUSM) of roofs buildings, with a resolution grid of 0.50 by 0.50 metres. This step reveals itself as fundamental for processing the environmental analysis of the urban texture. In particular, the implemented tool calculates solar radiation and solar accessibility on buildings’ roofs, in order to investigate the potential for implementing photovoltaic panels.

Agile software development has become popular in the past decade despite that it is not a particularly well-defined concept. The general principles in the Agile Manifesto can be instantiated in many different ways, and hence the perception of Agility may differ quite a lot. This has resulted in several conceptual frameworks being presented in the research literature to evaluate the level of Agility. However, the evidence of actual use in practice of these frameworks is limited. Objective: The objective in this paper is to identify online surveys that can be used to evaluate the level of Agility in practice, and to evaluate the surveys in an industrial setting. Method: Surveys for evaluating Agility were identified by systematically searching the web. Based on an exploration of the surveys found, two surveys were identified as most promising for our objective. The two surveys selected were evaluated in a case study with three Agile teams in a software consultancy company. The case study included a self-assessment of the Agility level by using the two surveys, interviews with the Scrum master and a team representative, interviews with the customers of the teams and a focus group meeting for each team. Results: The perception of team Agility was judged by each of the teams and their respective customer, and the outcome was compared with the results from the two surveys. Agility profiles were created based on the surveys. Conclusions: It is concluded that different surveys may very well judge Agility differently, which support the viewpoint that it is not a well-defined concept. The researchers and practitioners agreed that one of the surveys, at least in this specific case, provided a better and more holistic assessment of the Agility of the teams in the case study.

The Scrum software development framework was designed for the hyperproductive state where productivity increases by 5-10 times over waterfall teams and many colocated teams have achieved this effect. In 2006, Xebia (The Netherlands) started localized projects with half Dutch and half Indian team members. After establishing a localized velocity of five times their waterfall competitors on the same project, they moved the Indian members of the team to India and showed stable velocity with fully distributed teams. The ability to achieve hyperproductivity with distributed, outsourced teams was shown to be a repeatable process and a fully distributed model is now the recommended standard when organizations have disciplined Scrum teams with full implementation of XP engineering practices inside the Scrum.

Continuous Delivery (CD) has emerged as an auspicious software development discipline, with the promise that it can provide the capability to release valuable software continuously to customers. Our organization has been implementing CD for the last two years. We have moved 22 software applications to CD. I noticed that CD has created a new context for architecting these software applications. This paper makes an initial attempt to answer the following questions: 1) what are the characteristics of this CD context; 2) why we want to architect for CD; and 3) what architecting for CD implies. The answers can provide fellow practitioners with insights for architecting their software applications for CD, and provide researchers with valuable input for developing their research agendas.

The ISO 9241-210 standard provides a framework for human-centred design (HCD) activities comprising the four stages: context of use, specification of user and organisational requirements, design solutions, and evaluation against requirements. Other parts of the 9241 standard cover user interface design and usability. This paper uses the HCD framework to emphasise user experience (UX) design and methods used to help create good user experiences. It also relates the framework to an agile software development environment. It is concluded that the flexible and iterative nature of ISO 9241-210 makes it a good basis for both user experience design and an agile development process.

Scrum is the most popular agile methodology in software industry. By using scrum practices, several companies have improved their quality and productivity. This paper presents a practical view inside the Scrum practices, specifically, the team size, team structure and description of roles in Scrum teams are explained. The paper is based on our experiences in multiple projects executed in Scrum Agile methodology. Scrum is most suitable for products with team size of 3-9 members. For larger products, Scrum provides a mechanism called Scrum of Scrums. Scrum of Scrums distribute the large work/project into several teams and to control the quality and speed of each team, regular meetings are organized amongst the representatives of each team. We also present the guidelines for work distribution for the Scrum of Scrum (SoS) teams.

Little research data exist about agile teams and wellbeing. After changing our software engineering mode to agile, we wanted to find out if people experienced more or less stress than before. This study is based on a company-wide survey of 466 software engineering practitioners. We asked about their subjective feelings about stress, empowerment, and performance in their respective engineering teams after they had started to use agile methods. The results reveal that the feelings of higher performance improvement and sustainable pace are related, and that this difference is statistically significant. Respondents who feel that their team is empowered also feel less stress. However, no significant difference in feelings of stress and empowerment was found between respondents working in Kanban and Scrum mode after transition to agile. The group that was improving its performance because of agile was also reporting a better workload balance. The group that was experiencing worse performance because of agile methods was also more stressed. The differences may be explained by the management styles being practiced in the teams. The results are important as those verify in industrial setting what some agile books suggest: limiting workload and team empowerment has an impact on performance and stress. This contributes to our understanding how agile teams should be managed.

Agile software development pursues to deal with continuous change. But software product architectures without enough flexibility can restrict how products cope with change. However, designing for flexibility often entails high costs and risk that comes with the assumption that change will happen. Actually, in software architecture the flexibility investment decision making problem has become challenging. This paper presents a process to assist architects in MAKing dEcisions about Flexibility investment in Software Architecture (MAKEFlexi). MAKEFlexi is based on technical debt and real options approaches. Technical debt allows for estimating the additional cost derived from the lack of flexibility in software architectures, whereas the real options valuation allows for estimating the value of the flexibility that a design option could provide. MAKEFlexi has been applied to an industry project for smart grids to assist architects in making decisions about designing for flexibility to vary data storage technologies.

The overarching objective of this paper is to introduce a novel Fast, Efficient, and Scalable k-means k-means (FES-k-means*) algorithm. This algorithm is designed to increase the overall performance of the standard k-means clustering technique. The FES-k-means* algorithm uses a hybrid approach that comprises the k-d tree data structure, the nearest neighbor query, the standard k-means algorithm, and Mashor’s adaptation rate. The algorithm is tested using two real datasets and two synthetic datasets and is employed twice on all four datasets. The first trial consisted of previously MIL-SOM* trained data, and the second was on raw, untrained data. The approach presented with this method enables unfounded knowledge discovery, otherwise unclaimed by conventional clustering methods. When used in conjunction with the MIL-SOM* training technique, theFES-k-means* algorithm reduces the computation time and produces quality clusters. In particular, the robust FES-k-means* method opens doors to (1) faster cluster production than conventional clustering methods, (2) scalability allowing application in other platforms, and its ability to handle small and large datasets, compact or scattered, and (3) efficient geospatial data analysis of large datasets. All of the above makes FES-k-means* live up to defending its well-deserved name—Fast, Efficient, and Scalable k-means (FES-k-means*). The findings of this study are vital to the relatively new and expanding subfield of geospatial data management.

Prior to implementing "Agile" software development methods, organizations rooted in traditional "Waterfall" software development employed heavy upfront project design and limited changes and feedback during and between project stages. Waterfall methods make heavy use of outcome controls primarily monitored by the information systems function (ISF). This paper explores the control mechanisms used by the ISF and business function (BF) during and after the introduction of a major Agile project at a large U.S. company steeped in the traditional Waterfall method. Outcome control, the predominant control mechanism used in the case company, gave way to a hybrid-like control that possessed mechanisms of emergent control while maintaining vestiges of some Waterfall-like outcome control. We observed that, prior to the introduction of Agile, the software-development process was firmly in the hands of the ISF. The introduction of Agile shifted some of the controller authority over the development process from the ISF to the BF. Lessons learned from the case study point to the complexity of designing control mechanisms during a transition from the Waterfall method to an Agile approach.

In order to ease the propagation of updates between geographic datasets of different scales and to support multi-scale analyses, different datasets need to be matched, that is, objects that represent the same entity in the physical world need to be identified. We propose a method for matching datasets of river systems that were acquired at different scales. This task is related to the problem of matching networks of lines, for example road networks. However, we also take into account that rivers may be represented by polygons. The geometric dimension of a river object may depend, for example, on the width of the river and the scale.

This study aims to investigate the perceptions of software professionals in relation with impact of agile practices to accelerate the delivery of software products. Quantitative data obtained from a sample of 109 professionals were collected and analyzed by Pearson correlation and factor analysis. The results of factor analysis showed that the perception of professionals in relation to agile practices can be grouped into seven factors. From the correlation analysis, it was observed that customer satisfaction is the main variable influencing the perceptions of professionals regarding the use of agile practices to meet the deadlines on software projects.

Agile and user centered design integration (AUCDI) is of significant interest to researchers who want to achieve syn-ergy and eliminate limitations of each. Currently, there are no clear principles or guidelines for practitioners to achieve successful integration. In addition, substantial differences exist between agile and UCD approaches which pose challenges to integration attempts. As a result, practitioners developed individual integration strategies. However, success evaluation of current AUCDI attempts has been anec-dotal. Moreover, AUCDI attempts cannot be generalized to provide guidance and assistance to other projects or organizations with different needs. My thesis aims to provide a Software Process Improvement (SPI) framework for AUCDI by providing generic guidelines and practices for organizations aspiring to achieve AUCDI in order to address AUCDI challenges including: introducing systematicity and structure into AUCDI, assessing AUCDI processes, and accommodating project and organizational characteristics.

The general concern about environmental issues has involved the creation of national and international policies that require, at a technical level, the analysis, merging and processing of data obtained from very different sources. This paper proposes an approach for the integration of hydrological data that is based on the use of a multilingual ontology to facilitate the mapping across the local data models in the different sources. The novelty of the proposal is that the multilingual domain ontology is generated automatically by the merging and pruning of existing lexical ontologies. This approach has been tested in the context of the European Water Framework directive for the development of reporting applications in cross-border scenarios. Nevertheless, this approach could be easily extended to other domains.

We study a point pattern detection problem on networks, motivated by geographical analysis tasks, such as crime hotspot detection. Given a network N (for example, a street, train, or highway network) together with a set of sites which are located on the network (for example, accident locations or crime scenes), we want to find a connected subnetwork F of N of small total length that contains many sites. That is, we are searching for a subnetwork F that spans a cluster of sites which are close with respect to the network distance.

Utilizing pair programming in the classroom requires specific classroom management techniques. We have created nine guidelines for successfully implementing pair programming in the classroom. These guidelines are based on pair programming experiences spanning seven years and over one thousand students at North Carolina State University. In Fall 2007, pair programming was adopted in the undergraduate human-computer interaction (HCI) course at Virginia Tech. We present the pair programming guidelines in the context of the HCI course, discuss how the guidelines were implemented, and evaluate the general applicability and sufficiency of the guidelines. We find that eight of the nine guidelines were applicable to the Virginia Tech experience. We amended our peer evaluation guideline to account for constantly supervised pairing, as was the case at Virginia Tech. We add two guidelines stating that a pair should always be working toward a common goal and that pairs should be encouraged to find their own answers to increase their independence and self-confidence.

Loyal and steady customer base alone can keep the organizations successful in the current turbulent business environment. In the current era of software engineering, the success of a business process is measured in terms of 'customer satisfaction' rather than any other criteria like meeting deadlines for delivery, optimization of data, architecture etc. Day by day, customers are turning out to be more demanding, as their expectations from the software are growing. In order to achieve customer satisfaction in a meaningful way, software engineers are looking for more effective development models. "Agile" is one such model, that fits the bill and therefore industry is looking at with interest .Is agile better than traditional waterfall model will agile work effectively with distributed teams which is most common in the current software engineering Phenomenon. This paper highlights a few challenges with Agile->scrum and gives an insight to the user whether the agile is THE SILVER BULLET .

Combining agile project management approaches such as Scrum and software architecture related work has been found problematic. In this paper, we propose several models to align architecture knowledge management with Scrum, based on different architecture work practices in Scrum identified in the industry. The proposed models exploit an architectural knowledge base with a capability to generate architectural documents, and a decision-based architecture evaluation method.

In agile software development, planning meetings play a pivotal role in establishing a concrete understanding of customers' requirements. Using tools to enhance the effectiveness of the planning meetings without affecting the agility of the practices or disturbing the traditional settings is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose the use of digital tabletops as a means of collaboration in agile planning meetings for collocated teams. To support this proposal, we introduce Agile Planner for Digital Tabletops, a planning tool that was specifically designed for use on large horizontal displays. A multipart study involving a variety of qualitative methodologies was conducted to evaluate this approach. The study involved 14 individual participants plus a five member agile team. The individual evaluation suggested that in general, the tool is usable with minor issues to be considered in future design revisions. The agile team evaluation revealed a significant interest in the tool and its added benefits to the agility of the planning meeting with some issues to be further enhanced.

Image retrieval of landscape photographs requires accurate annotation using multi-faceted descriptions relating to the subject and content of the photograph. The subject of such photographs is dominantly the terrain and spatial objects visible from the photographer’s viewpoint. While some spatial objects in the background may be obscured by foreground vegetation, other visible spatial objects beyond a certain distance may not present noteworthy elements of the captured scene (such as distant houses). Our aim is to assess approaches to improve the identification of practically visible spatial objects for image annotation. These approaches include the consideration of the apparent spatial object size and landcover information about occluding vegetation. These inputs are used to enhance viewshed analysis to accurately identify only spatial objects practically visible and therefore likely to be notable subjects of a photograph. The two approaches are evaluated in an experiment in a semi-rural area of Switzerland, whose results indicate that visual magnitude is key in accurate identification of visible spatial objects.