| 1. |
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Agility Across Time and Space : Making Agile Distributed Development a Success
- 2010
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Rather than deciding whether or not to get involved in global sourcing, many companies are facing decisions about whether or not to apply agile methods in their distributed projects. These companies are often motivated by the opportunities to solve the coordination and communication difficulties associated with global software development. Yet while agile principles prescribe close interaction and co-location, the very nature of distributed software development does not support these prerequisites. Šmite, Moe, and Ågerfalk structured the book into five parts. In “Motivation” the editors introduce the fundamentals of agile distributed software development and explain the rationale behind the application of agile practices in globally distributed software projects. “ Transition” describes implementation strategies, adoption of particular agile practices for distributed projects, and general concepts of agility. “Management” details practical implications for project planning, time management, and customer and subcontractor interaction. “Teams” discusses agile distributed team configuration, effective communication and knowledge transfer, and allocation of roles and responsibilities. Finally, in the “Epilogue” the editors summarize all contributions and present future trends for research and practice in agile distributed development. This book is primarily targeted at researchers, lecturers, and students in empirical software engineering, and at practitioners involved in globally distributed software projects. The contributions are based on sound empirical research and identify gaps and commonalities in both the existing state of the art and state of the practice. In addition, they also offer practical advice through many hints, checklists, and experience reports. Questions answered in this book include: What should companies expect from merging agile and distributed strategies? What are the stumbling blocks that prevent companies from realizing the benefits of the agile approach in distributed environments, and how can we recognize infeasible strategies and unfavorable circumstances? What helps managers cope with the challenges of implementing agile approaches in distributed software development projects? How can distributed teams survive the decisions taken by management and become efficient through the application of agile approaches?
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| 2. |
- Badampudi, Deepika, 1984-, et al.
(författare)
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A decision-making process-line for selection of software asset origins and components
- 2018
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier Inc.. - 0164-1212 .- 1873-1228. ; 135, s. 88-104
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Selecting sourcing options for software assets and components is an important process that helps companies to gain and keep their competitive advantage. The sourcing options include: in-house, COTS, open source and outsourcing. The objective of this paper is to further refine, extend and validate a solution presented in our previous work. The refinement includes a set of decision-making activities, which are described in the form of a process-line that can be used by decision-makers to build their specific decision-making process. We conducted five case studies in three companies to validate the coverage of the set of decision-making activities. The solution in our previous work was validated in two cases in the first two companies. In the validation, it was observed that no activity in the proposed set was perceived to be missing, although not all activities were conducted and the activities that were conducted were not executed in a specific order. Therefore, the refinement of the solution into a process-line approach increases the flexibility and hence it is better in capturing the differences in the decision-making processes observed in the case studies. The applicability of the process-line was then validated in three case studies in a third company. © 2017 Elsevier Inc.
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| 3. |
- Betz, Stefanie, et al.
(författare)
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An Evolutionary Perspective on Socio-Technical Congruence:The Rubber Band Effect
- 2013
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Ingår i: International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement. - Baltimore : IEEE Xplore.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Conway’s law assumes a strong association between the system’s architecture and the organization’s communication structure that designs it. In the light of contemporary software development, when many companies rely on geographically distributed teams, which often turn out to be temporarily composed and thus having an often changing communication structure, the importance of Conway’s law and its inspired work grows. In this paper, we examine empirical research related to Conway’s law and its application for cross-site coordination. Based on the results obtained we conjecture that changes in the communication structure alone sooner or later trigger changes in the design structure of the software products to return the sociotechnical system into the state of congruence. This is further used to formulate a concept of a rubber band effect and propose a replication study that goes beyond the original idea of Conway’s law by investigating the evolution of socio-technical congruence over time.
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| 4. |
- Britto, Ricardo, 1982-, et al.
(författare)
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Evaluating and strategizing the onboarding of software developers in large-scale globally distributed projects
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier Inc.. - 0164-1212 .- 1873-1228. ; 169
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The combination of scale and distribution in software projects makes the onboarding of new developers problematic. To the best of our knowledge, there is no research on the relationship between onboarding strategies and the performance evolution of newcomers in large-scale, globally distributed projects. Furthermore, there are no approaches to support the development of strategies to systematically onboard developers. In this paper, we address these gaps by means of an industrial case study. We identified that the following aspects seem to be related to the observed onboarding results: the distance to mentors, the formal training approach used, the allocation of large and distributed tasks in the early stages of the onboarding process, and team instability. We conclude that onboarding must be planned well ahead and should consider avoiding the aspects mentioned above. Based on the results of this investigation, we propose a process to strategize and evaluate onboarding. To develop the process, we used business process modeling. We conducted a static validation of the proposed process utilizing interviews with experts. The static validation of the process indicates that it can help companies to deal with the challenges associated with the onboarding of newcomers through more systematic, effective, and repeatable onboarding strategies. © 2020 Elsevier Inc.
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| 5. |
- Britto, Ricardo, 1982-, et al.
(författare)
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Experiences from Measuring Learning and Performance in Large-Scale Distributed Software Development
- 2016
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement. - New York, NY, USA : ACM Digital Library. - 9781450344272
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Developers and development teams in large-scale software development are often required to learn continuously. Organizations also face the need to train and support new developers and teams on-boarded in ongoing projects. Although learning is associated with performance improvements, experience shows that training and learning does not always result in a better performance or significant improvements might take too long.Aims: In this paper, we report our experiences from establishing an approach to measure learning results and associated performance impact for developers and teams in Ericsson.Method: Experiences reported herein are a part of an exploratory case study of an on-going large-scale distributed project in Ericsson. The data collected for our measurements included archival data and expert knowledge acquired through both unstructured and semi-structured interviews. While performing the measurements, we faced a number of challenges, documented in the form of lessons learned.Results: We aggregated our experience in eight lessons learned related to collection, preparation and analysis of data for further measurement of learning potential and performance in large-scale distributed software development.Conclusions: Measuring learning and performance is a challenging task. Major problems were related to data inconsistencies caused by, among other factors, distributed nature of the project. We believe that the documented experiences shared herein can help other researchers and practitioners to perform similar measurements and overcome the challenges of large-scale distributed software projects, as well as proactively address these challenges when establishing project measurement programs.
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| 6. |
- Britto, Ricardo, 1982-, et al.
(författare)
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Learning and Performance Evolution of Immature Remote Teams in Large-ScaleSoftware Projects : An Industrial Case Study
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Context: Large-scale distributed software projects with long life cycles often involve a considerable amount ofcomplex legacy code. The combination of scale and distribution challenges, and the diculty to acquire knowledgeabout large amounts of complex legacy code may make the onboarding of new developers/teams problematic. Thismay lead to extended periods of low performance.Objective: The main objective of this paper is to analyze the learning processes and performance evolutions (teamproductivity and team autonomy) of remote software development teams added late to a large-scale legacy softwareproduct development, and to propose recommendations to support the learning of remote teams.Method: We conducted a case study in Ericsson, collecting data through archival research, semi-structured interviews,and workshops. We analyzed the collected data using descriptive, inferential and graphical statistics and softqualitative analysis.Results: The results show that the productivity and autonomy of immature remote teams are on average 3.67 and2.27 times lower than the ones of mature teams, respectively. Furthermore, their performance had a steady increaseduring almost the entire first year and dropped (productivity) or got stagnated (autonomy) for a great part of the secondyear. In addition to these results, we also identified four challenges that aected the learning process and performanceevolution of immature remote teams: complexity of the product and technology stack, distance to the main source ofproduct knowledge, lack of team stability, and training expectation misalignment.Conclusion: The results indicate that scale, distribution and complex legacy code may make learning more dicultand demand a long period to achieve high performance. To support the learning of remote teams, we put forward fiverecommendations. We believe that our quantitative analysis, as well as the identified factors and recommendationscan help other companies to onboard new remote teams in large-scale legacy product development projects.
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| 7. |
- Britto, Ricardo, 1982-, et al.
(författare)
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Onboarding Software Developers and Teams in Three Globally Distributed Legacy Projects : A Multi-Case Study
- 2018
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Ingår i: Journal of Software. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 2047-7473 .- 2047-7481. ; 30:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Onboarding is the process of supporting new employees regarding their social and performance adjustment to their new job. Software companies have faced challenges with recruitment and onboarding of new team members and there is no study that investigates it in a holistic way. In this paper, we conducted a multi-case study to investigate the onboarding of software developers/teams, associated challenges, and areas for further improvement in three globally distributed legacy projects. We employed Bauer's model for onboarding to identify the current state of the onboarding strategies employed in each case. We learned that the employed strategies are semi-formalized. Besides, in projects with multiple sites, some functions are executed locally and the onboarding outcomes may be hard to control. We also learned that onboarding in legacy projects is especially challenging and that decisions to distribute such projects across multiple locations shall be approached carefully. In our cases, the challenges to learn legacy code were further amplified by the project scale and the distance to the original sources of knowledge. Finally, we identified practices that can be used by companies to increase the chances of being successful when onboarding software developers and teams in globally distributed legacy projects.
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| 8. |
- Britto, Ricardo, 1982-, et al.
(författare)
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Performance Evolution of Newcomers in Large-Scale Distributed Software Projects : An Industrial Case Study
- 2019
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 2019 ACM/IEEE 14th International Conference on Global Software Engineering, ICGSE 2019. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.. - 9781538691960 ; , s. 1-11
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Large-scale distributed software projects with long life cycles often involve a considerable amount of complex legacy code. The combination of scale and distribution challenges and the difficulty in acquiring knowledge about massive amounts of complex legacy code may make the onboarding of new developers/teams problematic. These problems may lead to extended periods of low performance. The primary objective of this paper is to investigate the performance evolution of offshore newcomers onboarded in a large-scale globally distributed project and how it relates to the employed onboarding strategy. To achieve our objective, we conducted a case study in Ericsson. We identified that the following aspects in the onboarding strategy employed in the investigated case seem to be related to the unexpectedly low performance evolution: i) the distance to mentors; ii) the used formal training approach, which did not fit the sociocultural background of the newcomers; iii) allocation of large and distributed tasks in the early stages of the onboarding process; and iv) team instability. We conclude that the onboarding of newcomers in globally distributed projects must be planned well ahead and should consider avoiding the aspects mentioned above. © 2019 IEEE.
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| 9. |
- Britto, Ricardo, et al.
(författare)
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Software Architects in Large-Scale Distributed Projects : An Ericsson Case Study
- 2016
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Ingår i: IEEE Software. - : IEEE Computer Society. - 0740-7459 .- 1937-4194. ; 33:6, s. 48-55
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Software architects are key assets for successful development projects. However, not much research has investigated the challenges they face in large-scale distributed projects. So, researchers investigated how architects at Ericsson were organized, their roles and responsibilities, and the effort they spent guarding and governing a large-scale legacy product developed by teams at multiple locations. Despite recent trends such as microservices and agile development, Ericsson had to follow a more centralized approach to deal with the challenges of scale, distribution, and monolithic architecture of a legacy software product. So, the architectural decisions were centralized to a team of architects. The team extensively used code reviews to not only check the code's state but also reveal defects that could turn into maintainability problems. The study results also suggest that the effort architects spend designing architecture, guarding its integrity and evolvability, and mentoring development teams is directly related to team maturity. In addition, significant investment is needed whenever new teams and locations are onboarded.
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| 10. |
- Britto, Ricardo
(författare)
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Strategizing and Evaluating the Onboarding of Software Developers in Large-Scale Globally Distributed Legacy Projects
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Background: Recruitment and onboarding of software developers are essential steps in software development undertakings. The need for adding new people is often associated with large-scale long-living projects and globally distributed projects. The formers are challenging because they may contain large amounts of legacy (and often complex) code (legacy projects). The latters are challenging, because the inability to find sufficient resources in-house may lead to onboarding people at a distance, and often in many distinct sites. While onboarding is of great importance for companies, there is little research about the challenges and implications associated with onboarding software developers and teams in large-scale globally distributed projects with large amounts of legacy code. Furthermore, no study has proposed any systematic approaches to support the design of onboarding strategies and evaluation of onboarding results in the aforementioned context.Objective: The aim of this thesis is two-fold: i) identify the challenges and implications associated with onboarding software developers and teams in large-scale globally distributed legacy projects; and ii) propose solutions to support the design of onboarding strategies and evaluation of onboarding results in large-scale globally distributed legacy projects.Method: In this thesis, we employed literature review, case study, and business process modeling. The main case investigated in this thesis is the development of a legacy telecommunication software product in Ericsson.Results: The results show that the performance (productivity, autonomy, and lead time) of new developers/teams onboarded in remote locations in large-scale distributed legacy projects is much lower than the performance of mature teams. This suggests that new teams have a considerable performance gap to overcome. Furthermore, we learned that onboarding problems can be amplified by the following challenges: the complexity of the product and technology stack, distance to the main source of product knowledge, lack of team stability, training expectation misalignment, and lack of formalism and control over onboarding strategies employed in different sites of globally distributed projects. To help companies addressing the challenges we identified in this thesis, we propose a process to support the design of onboarding strategies and the evaluation of onboarding results.Conclusions: The results show that scale, distribution and complex legacy code may make onboarding more difficult and demand longer periods of time for new developers and teams to achieve high performance. This means that onboarding in large-scale globally distributed legacy projects must be planned well ahead and companies must be prepared to provide extended periods of mentoring by expensive and scarce resources, such as software architects. Failure to foresee and plan such resources may result in effort estimates on one hand, and unavailability of mentors on another, if not planned in advance. The process put forward herein can help companies to deal with the aforementioned problems through more systematic, effective and repeatable onboarding strategies.
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