2016-12, Anslow, Craig, Burkhard, Roger, Kropp, Martin, Mateescu, Magdalena, Vischi, Dario, Zahn, Carmen

Despite the availability of many digital agile board tools, most co-located agile software teams still use physical cardboards for their daily standup meetings. This is due to the fact that existing digital agile boards lacks supporting a collaborative workspace, direct interaction for the whole team in meetings, or making project information directly visible. In this paper we present aWall, a digital agile cardwall designed for the highly collaborative agile work style using large multi-touch wall displays. The effectiveness of aWall was evaluated in a user study with eleven software practitioners. Our findings indicate that aWall enables and encourages team work due to the large size of the wall, accessibility and visibility of large amounts of information, and possibility of customization of the interface. Based on this work, we suggest that augmenting digital cardwalls with large interactive touch technology and new interaction concepts is a useful way to support effective collaborative agile software development processes.

2014-12, Kropp, Martin, Meier, Andreas

Various studies show that the agile method has become a mainstream methodology for software development. When agile pioneers introduced this approach, they executed very successful projects which lead to the enormous popularity of agile development. With becoming mainstream, less experienced teams started to apply the agile approaches and news about failed agile projects appeared. This raises the question, what it needs to conduct successful agile projects. In a qualitative study we asked IT companies about the essential success factors in their successful agile projects. We found that there was a strong focus on engineering and management best practices. We found that when these practices did not work, mature teams sensed that following a recipe is not sufficient, and they started adapting the agile process to their needs. Applying a sense-making methodology like the Cynefin framework, theoretically explains our observations in the study.