Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

What do you do when you have endured an Agile experience where things didn’t go so well? You can abandon Agile altogether or you can take those lessons learned and apply them to future Agile projects. This paper discusses the journey travelled from that painful experience to becoming a more confident and experienced Agile practitioner. We will also look at some of the challenges that I still encounter today.

It is not surprising that agile methods are tailored or customized in various contexts and projects. However, there is little advice for practitioners for how to go about tailoring agile methods in large-scale projects. Henceforth, the aim of this experience report is to highlight some of the challenges with large-scale agile software development and especially how to deal with these challenges involves continuous tailoring of the agile method in use. In so doing, we report from a large-scale agile software development effort involving more than 120 participants in a Governmental organization and running for 3,5 years. The project consisted of three deliverables, partly developed in parallel after a delivery model based on Scrum. After a much troubled start related to scaling challenges and architecture complexity during the first deliverable, the project was turnaround and the second and third deliverables were portrayed fairly successful by both supplier and customer. From a practitioner’s perspective, we found that novel practices emerged through out the project that improved the way of working – especially across teams and stakeholders. Based on this, we describe some guidelines for tailoring agile in the large.

Hiring senior software engineers with experience in Agile and Lean has always been difficult. Training university graduates or engineers from other backgrounds takes time and can cause disruption to software teams. 7digital addressed both of these problems by starting a Technical Academy; a 6 month programme of classroom sessions, pairing, deliberate practice, personal project work and guided learning. Backed by key metrics and qualitative data, the paper explores the positive impact that the technical academy has had on the technology team and wider organisation at 7digital. It investigates the changes in technique, curriculum and structure that the team made over the three iterations of the academy. It goes on to detail the challenges that the team faced around justifying the time away from usual activities, measuring the impact, attempting to predict the long term benefit and make the result of extra diversity in the team more apparent.

This paper describes my experience as a female software developer with 17 years’ industry experience. Originally I worked with a more traditional waterfall approach to software design and development, but in recent years I have worked with XP. I have experienced many difficulties associated with being in a minority, but a lot of those problems have been alleviated since I started working with XP. My belief is that XP creates a more conducive environment for women and other minorities within the industry. I believe that XP can – and should – pave the way to making the tech industry a more welcoming and attractive place for women.

This experience report offers a beginner’s perspective on pair-programming with experienced developers. It discusses issues faced by juniors and seniors when working together and highlights the importance of emotional maturity in pairs with disparate skill sets. This paper considers personal characteristics of junior and senior developers in identifying their needs from the pairing session and shares tactics used to improve pair-programming experience on individual and team-wide levels.

Sketching is an important means of communication in software engineering practice. Yet, there is little research investigating the use of sketches. We want to contribute a better understanding of sketching, in particular its use during program comprehension. We propose a controlled experiment to investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of program comprehension with the support of sketches as well as what sketches are used in what way.

As part of our research concerning the integration of assurance case development with Scrum, we are planning to conduct semi-structured interviews with participants to gain feedback on a proposed approach. We will be interviewing individuals who have been involved with safety-critical systems development and Agile methods. Participants will be presented with an overview of the challenges associated with applying the 4+1 software safety assurance principles to Scrum. Initial recommendations concerning how the principles can be accommodated within a Scrum development will also be presented. Participants will be led through a series of questions to gain feedback on the feasibility of the approach, and for an assessment as to whether the 4+1 principles can be addressed without compromising agility. The motivation behind this research is to gain a deeper insight into the difficulties experienced when integrating assurance case in to Scrum process.

The software engineering community is continuously producing tools to tackle software construction problems. This paper presents a research study to identify which tools, artifacts, and commands developers use during task solving and how one can design software that can suggest and convince the developer to use specific software construction techniques. We want to understand under which conditions developers accept suggestions for a more efficient and effective usage of the available instruments, and if observed usage patterns correlate with observable improvements in the process or product. The expected results include detailed logs of how developers construct software during XP 2016, their preferences for software construction recommendations, and which effects accepted suggestions have on task execution and outcome.

In the last two decades, Agile and Lean approaches have gained wide acceptance in the software industry. In this realm, Kanban emerged in 2004 with a strong practitioner-driven support movement and today, Kanban is increasingly adopted to complement Scrum and other Agile methods. Kanban tends to focus on fast production, rapid and continual user feedback and interaction.

Software Quality Assurance is a complex and time-expensive task. In this study we want to observe how agile developers react to just-in-time metrics about the code smells they introduce, and how the metrics influence the quality of the output.