Month: April 2024

Most companies practicing Agile are not fully Agile but instead they combine both Agile and traditional practices in their operations. It is not clear how these practices can be successfully used together in an organisation. Aims: We
investigate practitioners’ mitigation strategies related to the challenge of doing Agile in a non-Agile environment.

Method: Strategies were collected during two studies, an online survey and an interactive workshop run at an Agile meetup and analysed thematically.

Results: Strategies related to the wider organisation and not just software development. Two perspectives emerged
from the data: an organisational and a change perspective. Five organisational themes were identified with Management and decision-making and Culture the two biggest themes. Nine change themes were identified, with Being open, Using specific approaches and Educating the biggest themes.

Conclusions: Better understanding is needed of how Agile practitioners can accomplish bottom-up change in their organisation.

https://oro.open.ac.uk/46962/1/ESEM16_short_final.pdf

Agile software development relies heavily on tight and continuous collaboration, which becomes a challenge when team members work at a distance. Despite significant focus on distributed Agile working, remote working, when only one or two individuals are not co-located with the rest of the team, remains largely unexplored. We focus on one organisation with several such teams and investigate one in detail using distributed cognition – a theoretical framework for studying collaborative work. We present the results of a group retrospective, and a comparative analysis of collaboration in the team, taking the contrasting perspectives of the remote worker and his co-located teammates. The analysis shows substantial differences in three aspects: virtual artefacts; information flow;
and the primacy of structure and facilities provided by collaborative platforms. Platforms that support meaningful collaboration and engagement for the remote worker, and create parity between all members of the team are crucial to integrating capability.

https://oro.open.ac.uk/47461/1/submitted%20%20version.pdf

As agile is maturing and becoming more widely adopted, it is important that researchers are aware of the challenges faced by practitioners and organisations. We undertook a thematic analysis of 193 agile challenges collected at a series of agile conferences and events during 2013 and 2014. Participants were mainly practitioners and business representatives along with some academics. The challenges were thematically analysed by separate authors, synthesised, and a list of seven themes and 27 sub-themes was agreed. Themes were Organisation, Sustainability, Culture, Teams, Scale, Value and Claims and Limitations. We compare our findings against previous attempts to identify and categorise agile challenges. While most themes have persisted we found a shift of focus towards sustainability, business engagement and transformation, as well as claims and limitations. We identify areas for further research and a need for innovative methods of conveying academic research to industry and industrial problems to academia.

https://oro.open.ac.uk/42061/1/Gregory%20et%20al%20Agile%20Challenges%20XP2015.pdf

There is wide acceptance in the software engineering field that industry and research can gain significantly from each other and there have been several initiatives to encourage collaboration between the two. However there are some often-quoted challenges in this kind of collaboration. For example, that the timescales of research and practice are incompatible, that research is not seen as relevant for practice, and that research demands a different kind of rigour than practice supports. These are complex challenges that are not always easy to overcome. Since the beginning of 2013 we have been using an approach designed to address some of these challenges and to bridge the gap between research and practice, specifically in the agile software development arena. So far we have collaborated successfully with three partners and have investigated three practitioner-driven challenges with agile. The model of collaboration that we adopted has evolved with the lessons learned in the first two collaborations and been modified for the third. In this paper we introduce the collaboration model, discuss how it addresses the collaboration challenges between research and practice and how it has evolved, and describe the lessons learned from our experience.

https://oro.open.ac.uk/42500/2/IJSAEM%20Formatted.pdf

Integrating User Experience (UX) design with agile development continues to be the subject of academic studies and practitioner discussions. Most of the existing literature focuses on SCRUM and XP, but in this paper we
investigate a technical company who use DSDM. Unlike other agile methods, DSDM provides a configurable framework and a set of roles that covers the whole software development process. While elements of the UX design
integration experience were similar to those reported with other agile methods, working practices to mitigate the challenges were identified using DSDM’s standard elements. Specifically, communication challenges were mitigated by extending two of DSDM’s standard roles. In addition, a change of focus between a design-led phase and a development-led phase of the project changed the communication challenges. Agile teams need to be aware that this change of focus can happen and the implications that it has for their work.

https://oro.open.ac.uk/40418/1/XP2014CameraReady.pdf

This paper considers the use of public displays, such as whiteboards and papers pinned to walls, by different
software development teams, based on evidence from a number of empirical studies. This paper outlines differences in use observed between traditional and agile teams and begins to identify the implications that they may have for software development.

https://oro.open.ac.uk/35494/1/The%20mystery%20of%20the%20writing%20that%20isnt%20on%20the%20wall%20diffrences%20in%20public%20representations%20in%20traditional%20and%20agile%20software%20development.pdf

http://vectoredvalue.com/the-transition-from-design-thinking-to-systems-thinking-demonstrates-tenure/

Love these ideas. Yes, and… all that data these devices can generate for analysis by the AI of the future.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/04/the-fediverse-of-things/

One of the logic tests I try to apply to ideas is ‘how generalisable is it?’. It’s kind of an academic/intellectual question, as often one of the ways to show the merit of research is how widely applicable is it outside of the area it was conducted in.

I thought about this when reading Jason Knight’s product to service scale. I ask myself what products and services don’t fit. Does the idea apply to government products and educational services, for example? What have others said about similar topics, does this agree or offer a different perspective?

In this case, it seems clear that the four definitions on the product to service scale are only applicable to a small range of commercial organisations. But, the idea that how an organisation talks about the people it serves (customers, clients, patients, etc.) reveals something about how they structure the offer they provide for them, is really interesting. That needs more thought.

https://www.infoq.com/articles/architecture-trends-2024/