Using an ethnographic process to conduct requirements analysis for agile systems development

Since the late 1990s, agile or lightweight software development methodologies have experienced a meteoric rise of interest among systems developers who consider traditional systems development methodologies (such as Structured Systems Development, Information Engineering, and Rational Unified Process) too inflexible for building systems having unpredictable and changing requirements. Agile methodologies try to adapt to rapid requirement changes by having short, iterative development cycles and by encouraging frequent, open communication with customers. However, agile methodologies are still in the process of devising systematic approaches on how to be adaptive to unpredictable and changing requirements and how to incorporate customers into the systems development process. In this study, we show how an ethnographic research process called Strip Resolution can be applied as a systematic complement to projects applying agile development principles. We illustrate, in detail, how the Strip Resolution Process (SRP) enabled us, in the role of systems developers, to adapt to changing and unpredictable user requirements and to incorporate customers into the systems development process.     

How agile software development methods reduce work exhaustion: Insights on role perceptions and organizational skills

Agile methods are widely used in the software industry as a way to more rapidly develop and deliver new software. They define iterative work processes, advocate self‐organization and openness for change, and prescribe how software developers interact with each other and external stakeholders. Despite their popularity, it is unclear how agile methods influence work exhaustion in software developers and how developer skills play into this effect. On the one hand, agile methods may reduce software developers' work exhaustion by levelling out their workload across the entire duration of a project. On the other hand, agile methods exert a high level of pressure on software developers to continuously deliver working software, create many intensive social interactions, and to frequently adapt to changes. In light of these effects, prior research could not explain why some software developers become less exhausted from using agile methods, whereas others perceive the exact opposite. Based on the job demand‐control model, we develop a theoretical model connecting agile method use to individual developer skills and to two established determinants of employee exhaustion: role conflict and role ambiguity. We tested our research model in a field study among 1894 software developers in 217 project teams that used agile methods. The random coefficient modelling results show that agile method use facilitates the achievement of clear and unambiguous role perceptions and thereby reduces work exhaustion in developers, particularly if developers possess the organizational skills to effectively interact with others in their organization. We highlight implications for theory on the individual‐level effects of software development methods and provide practical insights for software companies.     

Acceptance of agile methodologies: A critical review and conceptual framework

It is widely believed that systems development methodologies (SDMs) can help improve the software development process. Nevertheless, their deployment often encounters resistance from systems developers. Agile methodologies, the latest batch of SDMs that are most suitable in dealing with volatile business requirements, are likely to face the same challenge as they require developers to drastically change their work habits and acquire new skills. This paper addresses what can be done to overcome the challenge to agile methodologies acceptance. We provide a critical review of the extant literature on the acceptance of traditional SDMs and agile methodologies, and develop a conceptual framework for agile methodologies acceptance based on a knowledge management perspective. This framework can provide guidance for future research into acceptance of agile methodologies, and has implications for practitioners concerned with the effective deployment of agile methodologies.     

How to reduce the UX bottleneck – train your software developers

Usability and user experience (UX) methods come from academic environments, where industrial conditions such as time and resources are not of prime importance. Furthermore, usability and UX methods originate from a time when almost all software developments followed a traditional approach, such as the waterfall model. These two facts entail that existing methods often are too resource demanding and complex to apply directly into today’s agile, industrial environments. In this paper we make the claim that methods must be updated and tailored in order to be applicable within the agile, industrial development framework of today. We pursue a solution to simplify well-known methods and to train software developers to perform the UX work. To do this, three methods are modified via an iterative process together with the development of supporting materials. Software developers in three companies are trained in the methods to assess the approach. We find that it indeed is feasible to update and tailor existing usability and UX methods to fit into an agile, industrial environment. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to train developers to perform the usability and UX methods via one-day, in-situ sessions using an ‘instructor’-teaching approach. The training is based on hands-on exercises and real-life tasks. This further boosts the developers’ confidence in performing UX work and promises a better consideration of UX in the development phases. We evaluate our approach through observations of the developers performing the UX tasks on their own at a later point in time.     

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.     

Individual empowerment of agile and non-agile software developers in small teams

ContextEmpowerment of employees at work has been known to have a positive impact on job motivation and satisfaction. Software development is a field of knowledge work wherein one should also expect to see these effects, and the idea of empowerment has become particularly visible in agile methodologies, in which proponents emphasise team empowerment and individual control of the work activities as a central concern.ObjectiveThis research aims to get a better understanding of how empowerment is enabled in software development teams, both agile and non-agile, to identify differences in empowering practices and levels of individual empowerment.MethodTwenty-five interviews with agile and non-agile developers from Norway and Canada on decision making and empowerment are analysed. The analysis is conducted using a conceptual model with categories for involvement, structural empowerment and psychological empowerment.ResultsBoth kinds of development organisations are highly empowered and they are similar in most aspects relating to empowerment. However, there is a distinction in the sense that agile developers have more possibilities to select work tasks and influence the priorities in a development project due to team empowerment. Agile developers seem to put a higher emphasis on the value of information in decision making, and have more prescribed activities to enable low-cost information flow. More power is obtained through the achievement of managing roles for the non-agile developers who show interest and are rich in initiatives.ConclusionAgile developers have a higher sense of being able to impact the organisation than non-agile developers and have information channels that is significantly differently from non-agile developers. For non-agile teams, higher empowerment can be obtained by systematically applying low-cost participative decision making practices in the manager–developer relation and among peer developers. For agile teams, it is essential to more rigorously follow the empowering practices already established.     

Bodyshopping versus offshoring among Indian software and information technology firms

Investigations of offshore outsourcing of information systems have presented little evidence on developing country software and information technology (IT) industries. This study probes how Indian software and IT suppliers trade off work in India versus bodyshopping of employees. Worldwide clients view these practices as full offshoring versus on-shore temporary hiring from an Indian firm, but these practices are probed from suppliers’ perspective. Suppliers’ characteristics are theorized to affect their use of bodyshopping versus in-India work. A Reserve Bank of India survey of every Indian software and IT firm elicited suppliers’ use of bodyshopping to serve clients abroad. Consistent with theoretical rationales, suppliers that were larger, incorporated, public, and owned foreign subsidiaries most frequently provided bodyshopping among their international services. Bodyshopping was used frequently for IT purchasing and systems maintenance and infrequently for business process applications, and was infrequent to nations where bodyshopped labor costs were high. The evidence expands knowledge of the vibrant entrepreneurial IT industry in India and how it serves client firms abroad.     

Outsourcing success in the eye of the beholder: Examining the impact of expectation confirmation theory on IT outsourcing

Expectations have been found to exert a significant impact on client satisfaction in outsourcing projects and have been utilized to understand how individuals accumulate experiences and develop beliefs. In this study, we examine the impact of expectations on IT outsourcing success. Although extant studies identify multiple potential expectations, the expectations construct is often viewed as unidimensional with expectations examined at a general level. Furthermore, our multidisciplinary literature review indicates a gap in the literature regarding which expectations to employ. We therefore draw upon the Expectation Confirmation Theory (ECT) to determine a parsimonious set of expectations that combine to influence outsourcing success. Through an international survey of chief information officers (CIOs) and other senior IT outsourcing practitioners, we demonstrate the impact of expectations on IT outsourcing success. Moreover, we evidence that the should, minimally acceptable, and intolerable expectations can be used to predict outsourcing success. This study contributes to the outsourcing literature, specifically, and the multidisciplinary ECT literature, generally, by evaluating the multi-faceted nature of expectations. The results have practical implications for clients and vendors engaged in IT outsourcing and those who engage in expectation management.     

Outsourcing capabilities,organizational structure and performance quality monitoring: Toward a fit model

Provider IT services has grown substantially, since the advent of IT. However, research on it has been limited and mainly qualitative. A recurring provider problem was identified: a lack of attention to the performance of the IT they provide. Due to uncertainty or change in the client environment, the fit between capabilities and organizational structure of outsourcing providers must be balanced. Here we present the results of an exploratory quantitative empirical study among outsourcing experts involved with three different types of IT outsourcing providers: domestic, offshore, and global.     

Key Issues for Global it Sourcing: Country and Individual Factors

Globalization trends, trade liberalization in developing countries, quantum improvements in worldwide telecommunications infrastructures, and cost-cutting pressures have together compelled many companies to examine global opportunities for sourcing some of their IT operations. Such global sourcing, whether it involves insourcing or outsourcing, requires IT project managers to deal with issues unique to operating in heterogeneous international environments. This article examines the influences of country-level and individual-level factors on the effective management of offshore IT sourcing relationships and offers a set of best practices that project managers should consider when entering into such global arrangements.     

Are there contagion effects in information technology and business process outsourcing?

We model the diffusion of IT outsourcing using announcements about IT outsourcing deals. We estimate a lognormal diffusion curve to test whether IT outsourcing follows a pure diffusion process or there are contagion effects involved. The methodology permits us to study the consequences of outsourcing events, especially mega-deals with IT contract amounts that exceed US$1 billion. Mega-deals act, we theorize, as precipitating events that create a strong basis for contagion effects and are likely to affect decision-making by other firms in an industry. Then, we evaluate the role of different communication channels in the diffusion process of IT outsourcing by testing for the fit of the mixed influence model at the industry level. This helps us to evaluate the consistency of evidence at two different levels of analysis. We also evaluate two flexible diffusion models: the Gompertz and Weibull models. Our results show that the diffusion patterns of IT outsourcing do not appear to be lognormal, suggesting that IT outsourcing does not follow a pure diffusion process. Instead, we find the presence of contagion effects in the diffusion of IT outsourcing. During periods of the most rapid outsourcing growth – the contagion periods – the actions of the large and more visible firms may provide exemplars for smaller firms, reducing their inhibitions about committing to IT outsourcing. We also find that the results of the mixed influence and the Weibull models, which provide the best fit for overall IT outsourcing diffusion patterns, are potentially indicative of the existence of spillovers that might drive the observed contagion effects at the industry level.     

Effects of initial and ongoing trust in IT outsourcing: A bilateral perspective

Much has been written about the need for trust in outsourcing relationships, but the literature has produced only a few theoretical models that explain the process that helps it evolve. We proposed a theoretical model by distinguishing ongoing beliefs, such as ongoing trust and distrust, from initial perceptions, such as initial trust and distrust, in the context of IT outsourcing, and then explored empirically how these interacted with one another the knowledge sharing experience between the participants, thus leading to a successful experience from both the outsourcer and the service provider. The model and its hypotheses were tested using two-stage survey data collected from IT outsourcing projects. Our results showed that the ongoing trust and distrust between the receiver and provider were crucial in attaining benefits and that the outcome was also affected by the perceptions of the participants at the initial stage of the outsourcing process. We also found that knowledge-sharing experience between the parties moderated the impact of initial trust or distrust on the ongoing trust or distrust in different ways: the change in the service provider's initial perceptions were apparently more visible and positive than those of the service receiver's, although both initial perceptions tended to be cognitively consistent. These results helped us understand how trust evolves over time in an outsourcing relationship, and enabled us to explore the different viewpoints of the service provider and receiver.     

How Multinational Corporations Use Information Technology to Manage Global Operations

Despite a generally acknowledged importance of information technology (IT) in enabling global strategy and a broad understanding of the manner in which IT enhances coordination and reduces cost, few studies have focused precisely on how multinational corporations (MNCs) use IT to facilitate globalization. To address this gap in the literature, we conduct a case study across four large MNCs, and use primary data to develop predictive propositions on the characteristics of products, processes, and customers that impact the ways in which MNCs use IT to manage their global operations.     

Knowledge transfer in IT offshoring relationships: the roles of social capital,efficacy and outcome expectations

Information technology (IT) development in global organisations relies heavily on the transfer of tacit and complex knowledge from onshore units to offshore subsidiaries. A central concern of such organisations is the development of social capital, which is known to facilitate the smooth transfer of knowledge. However, only a few studies in IS research have explicitly examined the role of social capital for knowledge transfer in an IT offshoring context. In this paper, we argue that such knowledge transfer mechanisms can be understood better by considering social capital in concert with knowledge senders' efficacy and outcome expectations, two of the potentially key motivational drivers of knowledge transfer. We develop our arguments through a qualitative case study of a large German multinational company. German IT developers in this firm provided in‐depth accounts of their experience with offshore colleagues in an Indian captive subsidiary unit. Drawing on our analysis, we develop a model that depicts the influence of social capital, efficacy and outcome expectations on onshore IT developers' ability and willingness to transfer knowledge to offshore colleagues. Through the model, we also explain how social capital, efficacy and outcome expectations are interrelated and generate three interlocked, self‐reinforcing circles of knowledge transfer success in IT offshoring relationships.     

An empirical investigation of the drivers of software outsourcing decisions in Japanese organizations

Although Japan represents the single largest Asian market and 10% of the global software outsourcing market, little is understood about how Japanese companies make software project outsourcing decisions. Tried-and-tested outsourcing models consistently fail to predict the outsourcing decisions of Japanese companies, leaving global software development companies with little usable guidance in the Japanese outsourcing market. Analyses of 396 software project outsourcing decisions made by 33 IT managers in Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM-Japan, and Mitsubishi provides novel insights into the drivers of Japanese software outsourcing decisions. The objective of this paper is to develop an analytic tool to predict the likelihood of a software project being outsourced by Japanese IT managers.     

我国IT服务行业的发展前景与人才储备需求分析

随着经济全球化发展趋势加快和市场竞争的加剧,如何专注自己的核心业务已经成为企业最重要的生存法则之一.2000年至今,全球IT服务外包业务高速增长带动了全球IT服务外包产业的快速发展,IT服务企业雨后春笋一般纷纷成长起来,但IT服务企业数量和规模还远远不够,IT服务人才短缺和结构的不合理严重制约了我国IT服务外包产业的快速发展.随着中国IT技术市场与国际标准的全面接轨,IT服务人才的培养和储备已经成为我国与各国IT服务行业之间竞争的主要砝码.本文分析了我国IT服务行业的发展前景,以及对IT服务人才的潜在需求,以帮助IT服务企业做好人力资源规划,同时也为高等学校培养IT服务人才提供参考依据.     

It and Business Process Outsourcing: The Knowledge Potential

Despite the widespread trends in IT and business process outsourcing, there has been too little focus on what happens to knowledge when an organization outsources. We present a framework for evaluating the knowledge potential within five different types of insourcing and outsourcing arrangements. A detailed example of an enterprise partnership relationship is described as a benchmark for how companies can leverage the knowledge potential from IT and BPO outsourcing.     

Scaling agile methods

Using agile methods to develop large systems presents a thorny set of issues. If large teams are to produce lots of software functionality quickly, the agile methods involved must scale to meet the task. After all, a small team could create the software if the functionality to be delivered was small and, conversely, could be delivered given we had the time. Scaling agile teams thus becomes an issue if the only option for meeting a system delivery deadline is to have many developers working concurrently.     

What software engineering can learn from soccer

We've talked about software quality for a long time, developing numerous software quality assurance approaches in the hope of making our software increasingly better. Charles Mann, contributing editor of MIT's Technology Review, points out that other technologies-televisions, cars, airplanes, bridges-have improved over time as their engineering matured; he asks why software has not. In the February 2001 issue of Communications of the ACM, Edsger Dijkstra said that software's biggest challenge is "how not to make a mess of it." So, where have we gone wrong? To answer this question, we can look at how other disciplines learn and grow. Software development is as much an art as a science, and we learn lessons from both perspectives. Many of us think of ourselves as engineers: we train in engineering departments and rely on engineering tools, techniques, and quantitative methods to guide us. But our work's artistic side-which those who promote agile methods often emphasize-plays an important role, too. As good software developers, we are grounded in artistic engineering activities such as modeling and design. Our good people skills enable us to work with customers and on teams. And we need good instincts to select the best approaches and products to use.