The Agile Conference series has become the premier place for bringing to the international community the results of scientific rigorous research on agile software development processes and practices. The organizers of the Research Stage invite researchers to contribute to the body of knowledge on the matter of agile methods and processes, agile teams and people, and the tools and practices that support them. We aim at bridging the gap between research and practice in a way that both will continuously feed each other.
Rather than striving to be perfectly agile, some organizations desire to be more agile than their competition and/or the industry. The Comparative Agility (CA) assessment tool can be used to aid organizations in determining their relative agility compared with other teams who responded to the CA. This paper provides an overview of industry trends in agility based upon 1235 CA respondents. Additionally, it goes further in-depth on explaining the results of four industrial teams. The paper also discusses the resultant process improvement of these teams subsequent to reviewing their CA results.
| Presenter(s): | L. Williams, K. Rubin, M. Cohn |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 09:00 - 09:30  |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere I |
| Level: | Practicing |
This paper applied factor analysis on a set of data that was collected to study the effectiveness of 58 different agile practices. The analysis extracted 15 factors; each was associated with a list of practices. Correlations between the extracted factors are calculated, and the significant correlation findings suggests that people who applied iterative and incremental development and quality assurance practices had a high success rate, that communication with the customer is not very popular as it had negative correlations with governance and iterative and incremental development.
| Presenter(s): | N. Abbas, A. Gravell |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 09:30 - 10:00 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere I |
| Level: | Practicing |
Despite high expectations, agile methods have not always produced the desired results. The suitability of various agile practices depends on many situational factors. This paper introduces a repository of agile methods that provides evidential knowledge about the needed conditions and promised benefits of Agile Method Fragments (AMFs). The knowledge is gathered through systematic review of empirical studies of agile methods in various project situations. A modeling approach is used to visualize the combined effect of a set of AMFs, and their suitability for a particular adoption context.
| Presenter(s): | H. C. Esfahan, E. Yu, M. C. Annosi |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 10:00 - 10:30 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere I |
| Level: | Practicing |
Agile organizations focus on developing software systems that satisfy their current customer base, without worrying about best practices to handle variations of requirements in the system. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and contribute a lightweight, iterative approach that enables agile organizations to manage variability on demand in a reactive manner. The approach relies on agile practices like iterative development, refactoring, and continuous integration and testing. We show how the approach was used through a real case study, and we discuss its advantages and limitations.
| Presenter(s): | Y. Ghanam, D. Andreychuk, F. Maurer |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 11:00 - 11:30 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere I |
| Level: | Practicing |
The benefits ascribed to Agile methods are attractive to software engineers working in the safety-critical software domain. In this paper, we propose an iterative approach for developing safety-critical software. Firstly, we address the notion of up-front design, and describe the characteristics of an up-front design that is minimal from the perspective of achieving safety objectives. Secondly, we identify a key difficulty of using iterative development for building safety-critical software, and present a way to develop both a software system and a safety argument iteratively.
| Presenter(s): | X. Ge, R. Paige, J. McDermid |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 11:30 - 12:00 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere I |
| Level: | Practicing |
Code reviews have many benefits, most importantly to find bugs early in the development phase and to enforce coding standards. Still, it is widely accepted that formal code reviews are time-consuming and the practical applicability in agile development is controversial. This work presents a continuous differential-based method and tool for code reviews. By using a continuous approach to code reviews, the review overhead can be reduced and the effectiveness and applicability in agile environments shall be improved.
| Presenter(s): | M. Bernhart, A. Mauczka, T. Grechenig |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 12:00 - 12:30 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere I |
| Level: | Practicing |
We have many stray reports on problems and challenges to be encountered in distributed and Agile environments. However, we lack an overall picture of what types of problems and challenges the companies may encounter when attempting to marry the two methods. In this paper, we analyze twelve case studies from the existing literature and map out problems reported in them and group them into classes. These are Culture, Time Zone, Communication, Customer Collaboration, Trust, Training and Technical Issues. We conclude that it is possible to marry agile and distributed software development methods.
| Presenter(s): | M. Kajko-Mattsson, G. Azizyan, M. K. Magarian |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 13:30 - 14:00 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere I |
| Level: | Practicing |
Lack of tool support is hindering the growing interest in incorporating usability evaluation into agile software development practices. To address this concern we have developed ActiveStory Enhanced, a tool for creation and remote evaluation of low-fidelity prototypes. Building on its predecessor, ActiveStory Enhanced remotely collects more forms of usability data and provides new visualizations of this data to aid in the detection of usability flaws.
| Presenter(s): | A. Hosseini-Khayat, T. D. Hellmann, F. Maurer |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 14:00 - 14:30 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere I |
| Level: | Practicing |
Many factors contribute to the success or failure of an offshore Agile software development, e.g. development strategy, project type, communication channel, cultural differences, split locations and size of a project. Our survey has shown that coding and testing phases are best suited for off-shoring in any iteration of discipline-oriented sprint life cycle development. We have also found that the maximum success rates for feature-oriented development strategy is obtained by developing general modules of a project at distributed location and critical modules at onshore.
| Presenter(s): | F. Malik, H. Majeed |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 14:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere I |
| Level: | Practicing |
In this paper, we present a statistically tested evidence about how quality and success rate are correlated with variables reflecting the organization, its project governance, and the use of retrospectives and metrics. The results presented in this paper are based on the Agile Projects Governance Survey that collected 129 responses. The findings suggest that when applying agile software development, the quality of software improves as the organization measures customer satisfaction more frequently, and as the impact of retrospective increases.
| Presenter(s): | N. Abbas, A. Gravell |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 15:30 - 16:00 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere I |
| Level: | Practicing |
Stakeholder Theory is an area of strategic management that defines a stakeholder as someone who affects or is affected by the actions of the organization. This paper describes the application of stakeholder theory to a global product development company undergoing a multi-year transition to agile development. A model is presented for mapping stakeholders into stakeholder groups, and for quantifying the influence of stakeholders. This paper further uses a stakeholder approach to demonstrate how traditional organization roles map to roles in an agile product development organization.
| Presenter(s): | K. Power |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 16:00 - 16:30 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere I |
| Level: | Practicing |
Panelists: - Scott Ambler - Rachel Davies - Frank Maurer - Laurie Williams - Steve Adolph
| Presenter(s): | Sallyann Freudenberg |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 16:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere I |
| Level: | Practicing |
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Producer: Joe Chao
Co-Producer: Sallyann Freudenberg