2023-02-10, Rüegger, Janick, Kropp, Martin

Even in the time of agile software development and devOps, maintenance and evolution of large-scale software systems remain challenging. This is not only caused by technical debt, but is heavily caused by lost knowledge, high complexity of micro-service architectures, difficult requirements management, not available documentation, and the complexity of communication among and coordination of the many stakeholders. In our session we will talk about the challenges we identified in our study and present new approaches to address these challenges.

2022, Sallin, Marc, Kropp, Martin, Stray, Viktoria, Stol, Klaas-Jan, Paasivaara, Maria, Kruchten, Philippe

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.

2021, Sallin, Marc, Kropp, Martin, Anslow, Craig, Quilty, James W., Meier, Andreas, Gregory, Peggy, Lassenius, Casper, Wang, Xiaofeng, Kruchten, Philippe

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.

2020, Scott-Hill, Brandon, Anslow, Craig, Ferreira, Jennifer, Kropp, Martin, Mateescu, Magdalena, Meier, Andreas

2023, Sallin, Marc, Kropp, Martin, Anslow, Craig, Biddle, Robert, Stettina, Christoph J., Garbajosa, Juan, Kruchten, Philippe

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.

2021, Biddle, Robert, Kropp, Martin, Meier, Andreas, Anslow, Craig, Pfeiffer, Sabine, Nicklich, Manuel, Sauer, Stefan

2020-06, Kropp, Martin, Meier, Andreas, Anslow, Craig, Biddle, Robert

In this paper we address the topic of software development team members satisfaction with their development process. We present an in-depth analysis of the results of a nationwide survey about software development in Switzerland. We wanted to find out if satisfaction relates to the applied development method, and to the use of various practices, and impacts on business, team and software issues. We found that higher satisfaction is reported more by those using Agile development than with plan-driven processes. We explored the different perspectives of developers and those with a management role and found a high consistency of satisfaction between Agile developers and Agile management, and differences with those using working plan-driven methods. We found that certain practices and impacts have high correlations to satisfaction, and that collaborative processes are closely related to satisfaction. We then explored the relationship between satisfaction and various other perspectives. Our results in this analysis are principally descriptive, but we think they can be a relevant contribution to understand the challenges for everyone involved in Agile development.

2022-06-09, Weichbrodt, Johann, Kropp, Martin, Biddle, Robert, Gregory, Peggy, Anslow, Craig, Bühler, Ursina Maria, Mateescu, Magdalena, Meier, Andreas, Stray, Viktoria, Stol, Klaas-Jan, Paasivaara, Maria, Kruchten, Philippe

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.

2021, Müller, Debora, Kropp, Martin, Anslow, Craig, Meier, Andreas

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.

2020, Kropp, Martin, Meier, Andreas, Anslow, Craig, Biddle, Robert