Kropp, Martin
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Waste self-reporting for software development productivity improvement
Little research has been done on enabling software development teams to self-report waste to assist in productivity improvement. This study created a waste categorization and survey for teams to identify and quantify wasteful activities. Developers from a Swiss company used the survey for three weeks. Participants found the survey helpful for identifying waste but there was little evidence that self-reported waste correlated with improved performance.
The Effects on Social Support and Work Engagement with Scrum Events
One of the core values of the Agile Manifesto is “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” Scrum implements interaction through key events (Sprint, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Retrospective). There is limited work done on how these events influence perceived social support and work engagement. This paper examines perceived social support as a strengthening factor on work engagement in an agile work environment. Drawing upon the Job Demands-Resource Model, the research question is how do Scrum events relate to social support and what effect do they have on work engagement? We conducted an online survey with 132 Scrum professionals and analyzed the data using structural equation modelling. Results show that the Scrum event Retrospective strengthened social support. Moreover, social support is positively related to work engagement. The research contributes to the limited empirical understanding on perceived social support as well as work engagement in an agile work environment. It provides companies with an understanding of the importance of Retrospectives as a Scrum event.
Understanding Leadership in Agile Software Development Teams: Who and How?
In this paper we report on a study of the nature of different aspects of leadership in agile teams. We used an established model of leadership, distinguishing transactional and transformational styles, and asked IT professionals a set of questions about the leadership they experience, both from direct supervisors (hierarchical leadership) and from the team itself (shared leadership). Our results show that agility is indeed related to the transformational style, but that the transactional style also plays a part, especially as shared leadership. Furthermore, even in highly agile software development, leadership by direct supervisors still plays an important role. We propose that, as software development becomes more agile, the transactional aspects of leadership may shift away from the leadership dyad between supervisor and employee into the agile team, while transformational leadership is important for both the team and supervisors.
Measuring Software Delivery Performance Using the Four Key Metrics of DevOps
The Four Key Metrics of DevOps have become very popular for measuring IT-performance and DevOps adoption. However, the measurement of the four metrics deployment frequency, lead time for change, time to restore service and change failure rate is often done manually and through surveys - with only few data points. In this work we evaluated how the Four Key Metrics can be measured automatically and developed a prototype for the automatic measurement of the Four Key Metrics. We then evaluated if the measurement is valuable for practitioners in a company. The analysis shows that the chosen measurement approach is both suitable and the results valuable for the team with respect to measuring and improving the software delivery performance.
Benefits of card walls in agile software development. A systematic literature review
Card walls are often used to visualize various aspects of the software development process. They are an essential and widespread agile practice. Despite the drawback of physical card walls, its digital version is often not considered a sufficient alternative. This paper aims to find the reason for this and suggests how to evolve digital card walls into a viable alternative. We conducted a systematic literature review and analyzed twenty-two studies. We identified which desirable effects agile teams get from card wall usage and derived a set of properties a card wall needs to achieve those effects. Furthermore, we suggested a typology of card walls to compare the benefits and challenges among them.
Visualizing progress tracking for software teams on large collaborative touch displays
Stress in Agile Software Development: Practices and Outcomes
Stress is an important workplace issue, affecting both the health of individuals, and the health of organizations. Early advocacy for Agile Software Development suggested it might help avoid stress, with practices that emphasize a sustainable pace, and self-organizing teams. Our analysis of a 2014 survey, however, suggested that stress might still be commonplace in Agile teams, especially for those with less experience. We also noticed that newcomers to Agile emphasized technical, rather than collaborative, practices, and speculated this might explain the stress. We explored this in our analysis of a follow-up survey conducted in 2016, and report our findings in this paper. We show that there are a variety of factors involved, and that avoiding stress is associated with both collaborative and technical practices, and a range of outcomes.