Understanding agile software development practices using shared mental models theory

ContextAgile software development is an alternative software development methodology that originated from practice to encourage collaboration between developers and users, to leverage rapid development cycles, and to respond to changes in a dynamic environment. Although agile practices are widely used in organizations, academics call for more theoretical research to understand the value of agile software development methodologies.ObjectiveThis study uses shared mental models theory as a lens to examine practices from agile software methodologies to understand how agile practices enable software development teams to work together to complete tasks and work together effectively as a team.MethodA conceptual analysis of specific agile practices was conducted using the lens of shared mental models theory. Three agile practices from Xtreme Programming and Scrum are examined in detail, system metaphor, stand-up meeting, and on-site customer, using shared mental models theory.ResultsExamining agile practices using shared mental models theory elucidates how agile practices improve collaboration during the software development process. The results explain how agile practices contribute toward a shared understanding and enhanced collaboration within the software development team.ConclusionsThis conceptual analysis demonstrates the value of agile practices in developing shared mental models (i.e. shared understanding) among developers and customers in software development teams. Some agile practices are useful in developing a shared understanding about the tasks to be completed, while other agile practices create shared mental models about team processes and team interactions. To elicit the desired outcomes of agile software development methods, software development teams should consider whether or not agile practices are used in a manner that enhances the team’s shared understanding. Using three specific agile practices as examples, this research demonstrates how theory, such as shared mental models theory, can enhance our understanding regarding how agile practices are useful in enhancing collaboration in the workplace.     

A versatile virtual prototyping system for rapid product development

This paper presents a versatile virtual prototyping (VP) system for digital fabrication of multi-material prototypes to facilitate rapid product development. The VP system comprises a suite of software packages for multi-material layered manufacturing (MMLM) processes, including multi-toolpath planning, build-time estimation and accuracy analysis, integrated with semi-immersive desktop-based and full-immersive CAVE-based virtual reality (VR) technology. Such versatility makes the VP system adaptable to suit specific cost and functionality requirements of various applications.

The desktop-based VR system creates a semi-immersive environment for stereoscopic visualisation and quality analysis of a product design. It is relatively cost-effective and easy to operate, but its users may be distracted by environmental disturbances that could possibly diminish their efficiency of product design evaluation and improvement. To alleviate disturbance problems, the CAVE-based VR system provides an enclosed room-like environment that blocks out most disturbances, making it possible for a design team to fully concentrate and collaborate on their product design work.

The VP system enhances collaboration and communication of a design team working on product development. It provides simulation techniques to analyse and improve the design of a product and its fabrication processes. Through simulations, assessment and modification of a product design can be iterated without much worry about the manufacturing and material costs of prototypes. Hence, key factors such as product shape, manufacturability, and durability that affect the profitability of manufactured products are optimised quickly. Moreover, the resulting product design can be sent via the Internet to customers for comments or marketing purposes. The VP system therefore facilitates advanced product design and helps reduce development time and cost considerably.     

Model for Selecting Project Members to Minimize Project Uncertainties

Project risks come mainly from the future uncertainties, and new product and service development projects possess the most uncertainty and therefore the highest risk. However, if the project team has gained experiences from previous similar projects, the risk to the project drastically declines. In other words, an inverse correlation exists between member experiences and project risk. Therefore, the guiding principle would be to assign an experienced member to execute familiar work for that member. This study aims to establish a mathematical model that uses member experience to minimize project uncertainty. The nonlinear model assigns members with different experiences to the most suitable tasks to minimize project risk, and thus maximize project success rates under constraints of project costs and communication complexities. An experimental case is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model, and results indicated that under cost and communication complexity constraints, project uncertainty can truly be minimized by allocating an adequate member to the suitable task.     

Leveraging distributed software development

The Internet has been changing the way people collaborate on software development, offering certain advantages but also creating new requirements. Internet based collaboration does make a wider base of talent available, but the development cycles running at Internet speeds require maintaining higher levels of precision. From a project management perspective, communication is a key factor in Internet based development. Internet based collaboration requires effective team communication. The authors point out that when a development team isn't communicating well, it is nearly impossible to create and validate design solutions and manage the team's deliverables. So while Internet collaboration offers a number of advantages, the friction created by distributed (therefore delayed) communication typically increases the overhead associated with sharing project information. And the technology itself, including system interoperability and the synchronous or asynchronous collaboration tools, can create problems in a distributed development environment. As the complexities of distributed collaborative development environments increase, frameworks designed for such environments will become essential. The authors describe one such framework called SoftDock, and the new technologies it exploits. It lets developers analyze, design, and develop software from component models     

Proposition of a PLM tool to support textile design: A case study applied to the definition of the early stages of design requirements

The current climate of economic competition forces businesses to adapt more than ever to the expectations of their customers. Faced with new challenges, practices in textile design have evolved in order to be able to manage projects in new work environments. After presenting a state of the art overview of collaborative tools used in product design and making functional comparison between PLM solutions, our paper proposes a case study for the development and testing of a collaborative platform in the textile industry, focusing on the definition of early stages of design needs. The scientific contributions presented in this paper are a state of the art of current PLM solutions and their application in the field of textile design; and a case study where we will present, define, and test the mock-up of a collaborative tool to assist the early stages, based on identified intermediary representations.     

Understanding Representation in Design

Representing computer applications and their use is an important aspect of design. In various ways, designers need to externalize design proposals and present them to other designers, users, or managers. This article deals with understanding design representations and the work they do in design. The article is based on a series of theoretical concepts coming out of studies of scientific and other work practices and on practical experiences from design of computer applications. The article presents alternatives to the ideas that design representations are mappings of present or future work situations and computer applications. It suggests that representations are primarily containers of ideas and that representation is situated at the same time as representations are crossing boundaries between various design and use activities. As such, representations should be carriers of their own contexts regarding use and design. The article proposes that abstraction, elevating the representation from the situation, is not the only way to do this, and it proposes alternatives.     

Strategic decision-making in NPD projects according to risk: Application to satellites design projects

In this paper we present a method for making strategic decisions in New Product Development (NPD) projects based on risks. In NPD the complexity of the process depends both on the nature of the design problem and the difficulties associated with managing the project (activities, risks). To design a complex product several different teams, having different competencies, work on the project. Not one among them controls the entire process. The interactions between product subsystems in NPD often lead to technological arbitration between alternative solutions.     

The Learning Organization as Facilitator of Complex NPD Projects

With rapid technological and market changes, new product development (NPD) complexity is a significant issue that organizations continually face in their development projects. The inability to recognize and/or manage complexity can cause the best‐intentioned projects to fail. By creating a learning organization attuned to complexity and its management, however, companies are more likely to have the knowledge and skills essential to respond competently to the complexity frequently encountered in NPD projects. In this paper, we first define complexity in NPD and then examine organizational learning as it can assist in dealing with development complexity. Next, we report findings from an exploratory research study on organizational learning and its relationship to product development complexity. The study is based on 32 field interviews with NPD participants regarding their learning experiences in dealing with complexity; the transfer of project learning to other projects; and the factors that minimize/block the transfer of learning among projects. Based on our research, we advance several suggestions for implementing a learning organization designed specifically to capitalize on the experiences of development firms' efforts in dealing with complexity and its consequences.     

How to reduce new product development time

When entering the global market the companies encounter several difficulties, the most important one being excessive time for new product development. This problem can be solved by transition from sequential engineering to concurrent engineering, (Concurrent Engineering Fundamentals, Integrated Product and Process Organization, Vol. I, Prentice Hall PTR, New Jersey, 1996; Concurr. Eng. Res. Appl. 9 (2001) 191).The article presents the principle of concurrent product development process. The market forces small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) to a transition from sequential to concurrent engineering and as team work is the basic element of the concurrent engineering, special attention is being paid to team and workgroup forming in the loops of concurrent product development process in an SME. The article does not deal with communication issues within a team and among teams.A survey of published works in the field of designing teams in big companies has revealed that in big companies a three-level team structure is recommended, as well as a workgroup, consisting of four basic teams. Analysis of the three-level team structure has led us to the conclusion that in SMEs a two-level team structure and a workgroup consisting of two basic teams should be preferred.The results of designing a two-level team structure and the project of transition to concurrent development of mini-loader are presented. Time and cost analysis results prove the justification of transition from sequential to concurrent product development.     

How to get mature global virtual teams: a framework to improve team process management in distributed software teams

Managing global software development teams is not an easy task because of the additional problems and complexities that have to be taken into account. This paper defines VTManager, a methodology that provides a set of efficient practices for global virtual team management in software development projects. These practices integrate software development techniques in global environments with others such as explicit practices for global virtual team management, definition of skills and abilities needed to work in these teams, availability of collaborative work environments and shared knowledge management practices. The results obtained and the lessons learned from implementing VTManager in a pilot project to develop software tools for collaborative work in rural environments are also presented. This project was carried out by geographically distributed teams involving people from seven countries with a high level of virtualness.     

Enterprise systems, knowledge transfer and power users

There are few studies of knowledge transfer (KT) between groups with dissimilar purposes and dissimilar practices, which is the situation when transferring knowledge from an enterprise systems (ES) developer team to the users of the new ES. To support such KT, organizations identify a group of power users to work with the ES team and then to help other users integrate the new system into their operations. That KT process still encounters barriers. In a comparative case study of four such KT situations at two different companies we identify the critical barriers, and empirically uncover two new KT mechanisms that are effective for addressing the KT barriers in the ES context.     

VIRE: Sailing a Blue Ocean with Value-Innovative Requirements

Value-innovative requirements engineering guides software development organizations in creating new markets based on new product values for potential customers. Most requirements-engineering techniques and practices focus on eliciting requirements from existing, known customers. However, these techniques and practices aren't sufficient for surviving in current highly competitive markets. In particular, small organizations typically lack sufficient resources to compete effectively with large companies. W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne proposed the blue-ocean strategy to create new marketplace value and so make competition irrelevant. A "blue ocean" is a potential market where competition doesn't yet exist.     

Agentsheets: a medium for creating domain-oriented visual languages

Customized visual representations enable end users to achieve their programming goals. Here, designers work with users to tailor visual programming languages to specific problem domains. We describe a design methodology and a tool for creating domain oriented, end user programming languages that effectively use visualization. We first describe a collaborative design methodology involving end users and designers. We then present Agentsheets, a tool for creating domain oriented visual programming languages, and illustrate how it supports collaborative design by examining experiences from a real language design project. Finally, we summarize the contributions of our approach and discuss its viability in industrial design projects     

Challenges and industry practices for managing software variability in small and medium sized enterprises

Software variability is an ability to change (configure, customize, extend) software artefacts (e.g. code, product, domain requirements, models, design, documentation, test cases) for a specific context. Optimized variability management can lead a software company to 1) shorter development lead time, 2) improved customer and improved user satisfaction, 3) reduced complexity of product management (more variability, same $) and 4) reduced costs (same variability, less $). However, it is not easy for software companies, especially small and medium size of enterprises to deal with variability. In this paper we present variability challenges and used practices collected from five SMEs. Our study indicates that increased product complexity can lead growing SMEs to the time-consuming decision-making. Many of the analyzed medium size of companies also expect improved tool support to help them to boost their productivity when managing increasingly complex products and increasing amount of variants In fact, in many of the analysed SMEs, a high level of automation in design, release management and testing are or become a key factor for market success By introducing the challenges and used practices related to variability the paper deepens understanding of this highly relevant but relatively under-researched phenomenon and contributes to the literature on software product line engineering.     

Detecting Coordination Problems in Collaborative Software Development Environments

Software development is rarely an individual effort and generally involves teams of developers collaborating to generate good reliable code. Among the software code there exist technical dependencies that arise from software components using services from other components. The different ways of assigning the design, development, and testing of these software modules to people can cause various coordination problems among them. We claim that the collaboration of the developers, designers and testers must be related to and governed by the technical task structure. These collaboration practices are handled in what we call Socio-Technical Patterns.

The TESNA project (Technical Social Network Analysis) we report on in this paper addresses this issue. We propose a method and a tool that a project manager can use in order to detect the socio-technical coordination problems. We test the method and tool in a case study of a small and innovative software product company.     

Becoming agile together: Customer influence on agile adoption within commissioned software teams

Despite the ongoing expansion of agile practices beyond software firms, agile adoption remains risky, challenging, and poorly understood. Although agile practices emphasize self-organization and customer collaboration, we know little about how customers influence agile adoption within self-organizing teams. Here, we analyze how a commissioned software team engaged in customer collaboration during agile adoption at a Danish IT service provider. Our case study shows that the software team's transition to self-organized teamwork practices, agile planning routines, and active customer engagement was mutually dependent on the customer's trust in the software team and flexible collaborative routines. As a result, we advance a theoretical perspective of customer influence on agile adoption within commissioned software teams, implying that both software teams and customers need to navigate a contradictory tension between self-organization and collaboration to become agile together.     

Domain-specific portal for the precision component and tooling industry in Singapore—needs analysis and a test-bed implementation

This paper presents the observations and implications of Internet-based collaborative design and manufacturing in Singapore for targeted domain-specific areas—more specifically, the die and mould industry. Based on a survey, the issues faced by local companies are summarized and possible solutions are proposed. To promote the use of Internet for collaborative design, manufacturing and business in the local manufacturing industry, a test-bed domain-specific portal has been developed to facilitate collaborations among companies with their customers, suppliers and partners. Various technologies for value-added collaboration services are investigated and developed. These aim to facilitate business collaboration, such as partner selection, order process collaboration and collaborative planning, as well as engineering collaboration, such as collaborative product and tooling design and rapid prototyping over the Internet. The architecture of the e-manufacturing portal is presented and the collaborative technologies are introduced.     

Managing software requirements using quality function deployment

In this article we describe and discuss QFD (quality function deployment) as a framework for managing software requirements. Experiences were gained while participating as researchers in a commercial large-scale software telecommunications project at Ericsson Radio Systems AB. We found that prerequisites for succeeding with QFD include having visible customers and users, forming a cross-functional team adequately trained in QFD, and allowing adequate time for its first application. Advantages of using QFD are: better focus on customers and users, an effective means of prioritizing and communicating software requirements; and managing non-functional requirements. Issues not fully supported by QFD include adequate abstractions levels in describing requirements, handling temporal relations between requirements and initiating the use of QFD for a new development project.     

Quantification of cost and risk during product development

In response to customers’ rising demands for more customization and quality, companies are making more frequent changes to their products. A framework for a decision support system (DSS) which helps product development managers to understand the cost and risk of change is described and illustrated with a simple example of a thermoflask. The DSS assesses project performance metrics, such as development effort, development time, product cost and revenue, customer satisfaction, profit margin, and risk. The system allows the recalculation of these performance metrics when engineering change occurs during the creation of new design solutions. The assessment of different design solutions can then be performed by comparing the change in performance metrics. The DSS integrates methods from quality function deployment, functional analysis, and risk assessment that increases product knowledge during design stages in order to calculate the effects of engineering change, and thus, to support design managers in decision making.