| 1. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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On the relation between unit testing and code quality
- 2017
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 43rd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, SEAA 2017. - : IEEE. ; , s. 52-56
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Unit testing has been considered as having a key role in building high quality software, and therefore it has been widely used in practice. However, data on the relationship between unit testing and aspects of software quality remain scarce. A survey study with 235 survey responses from seven organizations was conducted in order to understand the correlation between practitioners' perception of code quality and unit testing practices. In addition, we conducted a case study in one of these organizations to investigate the correlation between unit test coverage and post-unit test defects. In both cases none or weak correlations were found. We recommend further research on the effectiveness of different testing practices in order to help practitioners to understand how to best allocate their resources to the testing chain.
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| 2. |
- Nilson, Mayra, et al.
(författare)
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Do Internal Software Quality Tools Measure Validated Metrics?
- 2019
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Ingår i: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). - Cham : Springer International Publishing. - 1611-3349 .- 0302-9743. ; 11915 LNCS, s. 637-648
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Internal software quality determines the maintainability of the software product and influences the quality in use. There is a plethora of metrics which purport to measure the internal quality of software, and these metrics are offered by static software analysis tools. To date, a number of reports have assessed the validity of these metrics. No data are available, however, on whether metrics offered by the tools are somehow validated in scientific studies. The current study covers this gap by providing data on which tools and how many validated metrics are provided. The results show that a range of metrics that the tools provided do not seem to be validated in the literature and that only a small percentage of metrics are validated in the provided tools.
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| 3. |
- Al Sabbagh, Khaled, 1987, et al.
(författare)
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The connections between group maturity, software development velocity, and planning effectiveness
- 2018
-
Ingår i: Journal of Software-Evolution and Process. - : Wiley. - 2047-7473 .- 2047-7481. ; 30:1
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Empirical evidence regarding the connection between group development (maturity) and the success of software development teams is lacking. The purpose of this research is to gain a qualitative and quantitative understanding of how velocity and planning effectiveness of software teams connect to a group development model. The Group Development Questionnaire was given to 19 software developers from 4 work groups to assess their group development maturity. The work groups' responses to the survey were checked for correlation with development velocity and planning effectiveness. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 16 individuals from the same 4 work groups to explore issues about their group maturity and to validate the responses of the interviewees in the Group Development Questionnaire. The measurement of the fourth stage of group development had a strong association with the planning effectiveness measurement, which means that a team with less issues in the fourth phase of group development is more effective in adhering to its plans. On the other hand, group development and velocity showed no significant convergent validity. We conclude that the dynamics within software development teams might correlate to their ability to deliver the expected outcome as planned but not to their ability to develop tasks faster.
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| 4. |
- Berntsson Svensson, Richard, 1978, et al.
(författare)
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Creativity Techniques for More Creative Requirements: Theory vs. Practice
- 2015
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Ingår i: EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA 2015), August 26-28. - : IEEE. - 9781467375856
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Requirements engineering was initially regarded as a front-end activity to form a basis for the coming activities of software development, which can be achieved by gathering and producing unambiguous and consistent requirements. However, in recent years, requirements engineering has been recognized as a creative process. A systematic literature review followed by an online questionnaire with practitioners were employed to identify a comprehensive overview of existing empirical evidence using creativity techniques in the requirements engineering process. The results show a limited range of applied creativity techniques with insufficient empirical evidence to adequately evaluate if the techniques create more creative requirements. The contribution of this study is threefold: First, it compares which creativity techniques have been empirically evaluated in literature. Second, it compares the identified creativity techniques. Third, it includes an examination of which creativity techniques are used in industry.
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| 5. |
- Bäckevik, Andreas, et al.
(författare)
-
Social Identity in Software Development
- 2019
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Ingår i: 2019 IEEE/ACM 12th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE). - : IEEE/ACM. - 2574-1780 .- 2574-1837. - 9781728122403
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- An agile approach has become very popular over the last decade, which requires good communication and teamwork within teams as well as with outside stakeholders. Therefore, social interaction is central for a software development team to be successful. Such social interactions form social identities and social structures in both teams and organizations. This study investigates possible effects that the social identity of individuals may have on the effectiveness of software development through seven in-dept interviews. The qualitative data from interviews were analyzed and summarized using summative content analysis, and the seven individuals also answered a questionnaire on social identity taken from social psychology research. The qualitative result shows that aspects of social identity affect software developers' behavior, and that we need to build cross-functional stable teams over time also from a pure social identity perspective in addition to the product related aspects to avoid a decreased effectiveness. However, we did not see clear connections to our operationalization of effectiveness in this study, and the quantitative analysis was also inconclusive, but we see value in our suggested method when investigating social identity in software development.
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| 6. |
- Chronis, Konstantinos, et al.
(författare)
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Agility Measurements Mismatch: A Validation Study on Three Agile Team Assessments in Software Engineering
- 2016
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP2016). - Cham : Springer International Publishing. - 1865-1348 .- 1865-1356. - 9783319335148
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Many tools have been created for measuring the agility of software teams, thus creating a saturation in the field. Three agile measurement tools were selected in order to validate whether they yield similar results. The surveys of the tools were given to teams in Company A (N=30). The questions were grouped into agile practices which were checked for correlation in order to establish convergent validity. In addition, we checked whether the questions identified to be the same among the tools would be given the same replies by the respondents. We could not establish convergent validity since the correlations of the data gathered were very few and low. In addition, the questions which were identified to have the same meaning among the tools did not have the same answers from the respondents. We conclude that the area of measuring agility is still immature and more work needs to be done. Not all tools are applicable to every team but they should be selected on the basis of how a team has transitioned to agile.
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| 7. |
- Gomes, Francisco, 1987, et al.
(författare)
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Evolution of statistical analysis in empirical software engineering research : Current state and steps forward
- 2019
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier Inc.. - 0164-1212 .- 1873-1228. ; 156, s. 246-267
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Software engineering research is evolving and papers are increasingly based on empirical data from a multitude of sources, using statistical tests to determine if and to what degree empirical evidence supports their hypotheses. To investigate the practices and trends of statistical analysis in empirical software engineering (ESE), this paper presents a review of a large pool of papers from top-ranked software engineering journals. First, we manually reviewed 161 papers and in the second phase of our method, we conducted a more extensive semi-automatic classification of papers spanning the years 2001–2015 and 5196 papers. Results from both review steps was used to: i) identify and analyse the predominant practices in ESE (e.g., using t-test or ANOVA), as well as relevant trends in usage of specific statistical methods (e.g., nonparametric tests and effect size measures) and, ii) develop a conceptual model for a statistical analysis workflow with suggestions on how to apply different statistical methods as well as guidelines to avoid pitfalls. Lastly, we confirm existing claims that current ESE practices lack a standard to report practical significance of results. We illustrate how practical significance can be discussed in terms of both the statistical analysis and in the practitioner's context. © 2019 Elsevier Inc.
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| 8. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
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A Flipped Classroom Approach to Teaching Empirical Software Engineering
- 2020
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Education. - 0018-9359 .- 1557-9638. ; 63:3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Contribution: A flipped classroom approach to teaching empirical software engineering increases student learning by providing more time for active learning in class. Background: There is a need for longitudinal studies of the flipped classroom approach in general. Although a few cross-sectional studies show that a flipped classroom approach can increase student learning by providing more time for other in-class activities, such as active learning, such studies are also rare in the context of teaching software engineering. Intended Outcomes: To assess the usefulness of a flipped classroom approach in teaching software engineering. Application Design: The study was conducted at an international master's program in Sweden, given in English, and partially replicated at a university in Africa. Findings: The results suggest that students' academic success, as measured by their exam grades, can be improved by introducing a flipped classroom to teach software engineering topics, but this may not extend to their subjective liking of the material, as measured by student evaluations. Furthermore, the effect of the change in the teaching methodology was not replicated when changing the teaching team. IEEE
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| 9. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
-
A fourth explanation to Brooks' Law - The aspect of group developmental psychology
- 2017
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Ingår i: 2017 Ieee/Acm 10th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (Chase 2017). - : IEEE. - 9781538640395
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Brooks' Law is often referred to in practice and states that adding manpower to a late software project makes it even later. Brooks' himself gave three explanation only related to concrete task-related issues, like introducing new members to the work being done, communication overheads, or difficulty dividing some programming tasks. Through a description of group developmental psychology we argue for a fourth explanation to the law by suggesting that the group will fall back in its group development when new members are added, resulting in rework setting group norms, group goals, defining roles etc. that will also change over time. We show that this fourth explanation is important when trying to understanding Brooks' Law, and that adding the group developmental perspective might help software development organizations in managing projects.
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| 10. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
-
Agile Process Consultation — An Applied Psychology Approach to Agility
- 2018
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Ingår i: 24th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS). - : Association for Information Systems (AIS). - 9780996683166
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- An agile change effort in an organization needs to be understood in relation to human processes. Such theory and accompanying tools already existed almost 50 years ago in applied psychology. The core ideas of Agile Process Consultation are that a client initiating a change toward more agility often does not know what is wrong and the consultant needs to diagnose the problem jointly with the client. It is also assumed that the agile consultant cannot know the organizational culture of the client’s organization, which means that the client needs to be making the decisions based on the suggestions provided by the consultant. Since agile project management is spreading across the enterprise and outside of software development, we need situational approaches instead of prescribing low-level practices.
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| 11. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Agile ways of working: A team maturity perspective
- 2020
-
Ingår i: Journal of Software: Evolution and Process. - : Wiley. - 2047-7481 .- 2047-7473 .- 1532-060X. ; 32:6
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- With the agile approach to managing software development projects comes an increased dependability on well-functioning teams, since many of the practices are built on teamwork. The objective of this study was to investigate if, and how, team development from a group psychological perspective is related to some work practices of agile teams. Data were collected from 34 agile teams (200 individuals) from six software development organizations and one university in both Brazil and Sweden using the Group Development Questionnaire (Scale IV) and the Perceptive Agile Measurement (PAM). The result indicates a strong correlation between levels of group maturity and the two agile practices iterative development and retrospectives. We, therefore, conclude that agile teams at different group development stages adopt parts of team agility differently, thus confirming previous studies but with more data and by investigating concrete and applied agile practices. We thereby add evidence to the hypothesis that an agile implementation and management of agile projects need to be adapted to the group maturity levels of the agile teams.
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| 12. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
-
Agility is responsiveness to change: An essential definition
- 2020
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Ingår i: 24th Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE2020). - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery. - 2153-1633.
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- There is some ambiguity of what agile means in both research and practice. Authors have suggested a diversity of different definitions, through which it is difficult to interpret what agile really is. The concept, however, exists in its implementation through agile practices. In this vision paper, we argue that adopting an agile approach boils down to being more responsive to change. To support this claim, we relate agile principles, practices, the agile manifesto, and our own experiences to this core definition. We envision that agile transformations would be, and are, much easier using this definition and contextualizing its implications.
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| 13. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Choosing Agile or Plan-driven Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Implementations - A study on 21 Implementations from 20 Companies
- 2018
-
Ingår i: 4th International Workshop on Socio-Technical Perspective in IS development (STPIS'18) co-located with 30th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2018). - : CEUR-WS.org. - 1613-0073.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Agile methods have gotten a good reputation for managing projects in many different sectors. A challenge among practitioners in the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) domain, is to decide if an agile method is suitable or not for new projects. This study investigates how decision-makers select between agile and plan-driven ERP implementation projects in relation to known factors from previous research. We selected projects that the decision-makers assessed as successful, but borderline, agile and plan-driven projects already implemented and let project managers fill out a survey consisting of key agile or plan-driven characteristics. We found that the assessment made by decision-makers did not differ on any aspects except higher executive buy-in for process change, and the prioritization of low cost in the agile projects. This study highlights the difficulty in selecting implementation strategy for a large part of the ERP implementations, and the data show that the decisionmakers could not make such a decision at an early point in time without contextual knowledge.
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| 14. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
-
Group development and group maturity when building agile teams: A qualitative and quantitative investigation at eight large companies
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier BV. - 0164-1212 .- 1873-1228. ; 124, s. 104-119
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The agile approach to projects focuses more on close-knit teams than traditional waterfall projects, which means that aspects of group maturity become even more important. This psychological aspect is not much researched in connection to the building of an "agile team." The purpose of this study is to investigate how building agile teams is connected to a group development model taken from social psychology. We conducted ten semi-structured interviews with coaches, Scrum Masters, and managers responsible for the agile process from seven different companies, and collected survey data from 66 group-members from four companies (a total of eight different companies). The survey included an agile measurement tool and the one part of the Group Development Questionnaire. The results show that the practitioners define group developmental aspects as key factors to a successful agile transition. Also, the quantitative measurement of agility was significantly correlated to the group maturity measurement. We conclude that adding these psychological aspects to the description of the "agile team" could increase the understanding of agility and partly help define an "agile team." We propose that future work should develop specific guidelines for how software development teams at different maturity levels might adopt agile principles and practices differently. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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| 15. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
-
Group-Development Psychology Training: The Perceived Effects on Agile Software-Development Teams
- 2020
-
Ingår i: IEEE Software. - 1937-4194 .- 0740-7459. ; 37:3, s. 63-69
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Research has shown that the maturity of small workgroups, from a psychological perspective, is intimately connected to team agility. This study showed a perceived positive effect of training agile teams in group developmental psychology. We therefore see huge potential in training agile teams in this topic since the positive effects might span over the entire software development organization.
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| 16. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
-
Group developmental psychology and software development performance
- 2017
-
Ingår i: IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion, ICSE-C 2017. 20-28 May 2017, Buenos Aires, Argentina. - : IEEE. - 9781538615898
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- © 2017 IEEE. Due to the fact that software development is a product of team effort it is important to investigate the influence of group developmental psychology on software development performance. In this case study we wanted to test how performance (i.e. velocity and planning effectiveness) are related to the group's maturity level. We gave the Group Development Questionnaire (the GDQ) to 19 software developers to assess their group maturity (i.e. their progress in their group development) and ran correlation analysis against the development velocity and planning effectiveness (i.e. earned points over planned points). The results show that group maturity is correlated to planning effectiveness but not velocity, meaning that group development is connected to the team's ability to plan well, but not their ability to implement tasks fast.
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| 17. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
-
Group Maturity and Agility, Are They Connected? - A Survey Study
- 2015
-
Ingår i: EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA 2015), August 26-28. - : IEEE. - 9781467375856
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The focus on psychology has increased within software engineering due to the project management innovation "agile development processes". The agile methods do not explicitly consider group development aspects, they simply assume what is described in group psychology as mature groups. This study was conducted with 45 employees and their twelve managers (N=57) from two SAP customers in the US that were working with agile methods, and the data were collected via an online survey. The selected Agility measurement was correlated to a Group Development measurement and showed significant convergent validity, i.e., A more mature team is also a more agile team. This means that the agile methods probably would benefit from taking group development into account when its practices are being introduced.
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| 18. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984-, et al.
(författare)
-
Is it possible to disregard obsolete requirements? a family of experiments in software effort estimation
- 2021
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; :3, s. 459-480
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Expert judgement is a common method for software effort estimations in practice today. Estimators are often shown extra obsolete requirements together with the real ones to be implemented. Only one previous study has been conducted on if such practices bias the estimations. We conducted six experiments with both students and practitioners to study, and quantify, the effects of obsolete requirements on software estimation. By conducting a family of six experiments using both students and practitioners as research subjects (N= 461), and by using a Bayesian Data Analysis approach, we investigated different aspects of this effect. We also argue for, and show an example of, how we by using a Bayesian approach can be more confident in our results and enable further studies with small sample sizes. We found that the presence of obsolete requirements triggered an overestimation in effort across all experiments. The effect, however, was smaller in a field setting compared to using students as subjects. Still, the over-estimations triggered by the obsolete requirements were systematically around twice the percentage of the included obsolete ones, but with a large 95% credible interval. The results have implications for both research and practice in that the found systematic error should be accounted for in both studies on software estimation and, maybe more importantly, in estimation practices to avoid over-estimations due to this systematic error. We partly explain this error to be stemming from the cognitive bias of anchoring-and-adjustment, i.e. the obsolete requirements anchored a much larger software. However, further studies are needed in order to accurately predict this effect. © 2021, The Author(s).
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| 19. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Is it Possible to Disregard Obsolete Requirements? - An Initial Experiment on a Potentially New Bias in Software Effort Estimation
- 2017
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Ingår i: 2017 Ieee/Acm 10th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (Chase 2017). - : IEEE.
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Effort estimation is a complex area in decision-making, and is influenced by a diversity of factors that could increase the estimation error. The effects on effort estimation accuracy of having obsolete requirements in specifications have not yet been studied. This study aims at filling that gap. A total of 150 students were asked to provide effort estimates for different amounts of requirements, and one group was explicitly told to disregard some of the given requirements. The results show that even the extra text instructing participants to exclude requirements in the estimation task, had the subjects give higher estimates. The effect of having obsolete requirements in requirements specifications and backlogs in software effort estimation is not taken into account enough today, and this study provides empirical evidence that it possibly should. We also suggest different psychological explanations to the found effect.
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| 20. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
-
Learning More from Crossing Levels: Investigating Agility at Three Levels of the Organization
- 2018
-
Ingår i: Proceedings - 2017 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence, CSCI 2017. - : IEEE. ; , s. 1035-1038
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Scholars have tried to explain how organizations can build agile teams by only looking at one level of analysis. We argue in this short paper that lessons can be learned from organizational science results explaining variance on three different abstraction levels of organizations. We suggest agility needs to be explained from organizational (macro), the team (meso), and individual (micro) levels to provide useful and actionable guidelines to practitioners. We are currently designing such studies and hope that they will eventually result in validated measurements that can be used to prevent companies from investing in the wrong areas when trying to move towards more agility.
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| 21. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
-
Non-technical individual skills are weakly connected to the maturity of agile practices
- 2018
-
Ingår i: Information and Software Technology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0950-5849. ; 99, s. 11-20
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Context: Existing knowledge in agile software development suggests that individual competency (e.g. skills) is a critical success factor for agile projects. While assuming that technical skills are important for every kind of software development project, many researchers suggest that non-technical individual skills are especially important in agile software development. Objective: In this paper, we investigate whether non-technical individual skills can predict the use of agile practices. Method: Through creating a set of multiple linear regression models using a total of 113 participants from agile teams in six software development organizations from The Netherlands and Brazil, we analyzed the predictive power of non-technical individual skills in relation to agile practices. Results: The results show that there is surprisingly low power in using non-technical individual skills to predict (i.e. explain variance in) the mature use of agile practices in software development. Conclusions: Therefore, we conclude that looking at non-technical individual skills is not the optimal level of analysis when trying to understand, and explain, the mature use of agile practices in the software development context. We argue that it is more important to focus on the non-t echnical skills as a team-level capacity instead of assuring that all individuals possess such skills when understanding the use of the agile practices.
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| 22. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
-
On gender, ethnicity, and culture in empirical software engineering research
- 2018
-
Ingår i: IEEE/ACM 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE). - New York, NY, USA : IEEE. - 0270-5257 .- 2574-1837. - 9781538661765
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This note highlights the importance of investigating diversity aspects in combination in empirical research. It draws on the psychological discourse and suggests why and how software engineering scholars can use the aspect of diversity in all their research endeavors.
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| 23. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984-, et al.
(författare)
-
Problem reports and team maturity in agile automotive software development
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Proceedings - 15th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, CHASE 2022. - New York, NY, USA : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 9781450393423 ; , s. 41-45
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Volvo Cars is pioneering an agile transformation on a large scale in the automotive industry. Social psychological aspects of automotive software development are an under-researched area in general. Few studies on team maturity or group dynamics can be found specifically in the automotive software engineering domain. Objective: This study is intended as an initial step to fill that gap by investigating the connection between issues and problem reports and team maturity. Method: We conducted a quantitative study with 84 participants from 14 teams and qualitatively validated the result with the Release Train Engineer having an overview of all the participating teams. Results: We find that the more mature a team is, the faster they seem to resolve issues as provided through external feedback, at least in the two initial team maturity stages. Conclusion: This study suggests that working on team dynamics might increase productivity in modern automotive software development departments, but this needs further investigation. © 2022 ACM.
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| 24. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
-
Psychological group processes when building agile software development teams
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Background: With the agile approach to managing software development projects, comes an increased dependability on well functioning teams. Agile teams are profoundly influenced by social-psychological factors since more communication and cooperation are needed both within the organization and team, but also with customers. Objective: The objective of this thesis is to investigate if and how psychological group processes, i.e. the temporal perspective often referred to as group development, is related to what is meant by an agile team. Method: A diversity of research designs and data collection methods were used, including surveys, interviews, and project data, to find and explain connections between team agility and group developmental stages, but also agile maturity model validity and individual nontechnical skills. A total of 311 people participated in the studies from 19 different companies situated in the US, Brazil, The Netherlands, and Sweden. Results: The results show that there are connections between group development maturity and what is meant by an agile team, demonstrating the relevance of psychological group processes when building agile teams. Group developmental issues were related to many aspects of how team agility is described, including team planning effectiveness, interpersonal conflict, open communication, and dedication. Moreover, the mature use of agile practices could not be explained by individual nontechnical skills and the efficiency of task implementation in agile software development teams were not dependent of group maturity, but instead individual technical skills. Conclusions: Our first conclusion is that many agile measurement scales are not scientifically validated and the construct of agility needs to be broken down into parts that need to be researched separately; one such part being what is meant by team agility. Secondly, agile teams at different group development stages adopt team agility differently, and the implementation and management of agile projects need to be adapted to what stage the team is in from a group-developmental perspective. We also conclude that efficiency, but not effectiveness, in agile software development might be more dependent on individual technical skills than group development and that individual nontechnical skills are poor predictors of the maturity of agile practices.
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| 25. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
-
Social Influence in Agile Requirements Engineering
- 2017
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the Work in Progress Session held in connection with the 43rd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA). - 9783902457486
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)
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| 26. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
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Standards of Validity and the Validity of Standards in Behavioral Software Engineering Research: The Perspective of Psychological Test Theory
- 2018
-
Ingår i: International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. - 1949-3789 .- 1949-3770.
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background. There are some publications in software engineering research that aim at guiding researchers in assessing validity threats to their studies. Still, many researchers fail to address many aspects of validity that are essential to quantitative research on human factors. Goal. This paper has the goal of triggering a change of mindset in what types of studies are the most valuable to the behavioral software engineering field, and also provide more details of what construct validity is. Method. The approach is based on psychological test theory and draws upon methods used in psychology in relation to construct validity. Results. In this paper, I suggest a different approach to validity threats than what is commonplace in behavioral software engineering research. Conclusions. While this paper focuses on behavioral software engineering, I believe other types of software engineering research might also benefit from an increased focus on construct validity.
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| 27. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
-
Studying attitudes and social norms in agile software development
- 2018
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Ingår i: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; Part F147763
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The purpose of this paper is to review research on attitudes and social norms and connect it to the agile software development context. Furthermore, I propose additional theories from social psychology (mainly the theory of planned behavior and using the degree of internalization of social norms) that would most certainly be useful for further sense-making of human factors-related research on agile teams.
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| 28. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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The importance of conflict resolution techniques in autonomous agile teams
- 2018
-
Ingår i: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; Part F147763
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Today, software companies usually organize their work in teams. Social science research on team development has shown that for a team to reach a productive and autonomous stage, it has to be able to manage internal conflicts and disagreements efficiently. To better facilitate the team development process, we argue that software engineers needs additional training in negotiation skills and conflict resolution. In this position paper, we outline ideas for what aspects to consider in such training. As an example, we argue that a majority of the conflicts originate from team-level factors and that they, therefore, should be managed on the team-level instead of in relation to dyads.
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| 29. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
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The links between agile practices, interpersonal conflict, and perceived productivity
- 2017
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Ingår i: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; Part F128635, s. 292-297
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Agile processes explicitly focus more on team-work than more traditional management techniques when building software. With high velocity and responsiveness on team-level come the risk of interpersonal conflict in the agile organizations. Through a survey with 68 software developers from three large Swedish companies, I found that the presence of interpersonal conflict was negatively connected to the agile practices Iterative Development and Customer Access. The agile practices Iteration Planning and Iterative Development were positively linked to the measurement of the developers' perceived team productivity. However, Continuous Integration & Testing was negatively connected to productivity. These results show which agile practices are directly linked to team productivity, but also, and more importantly, indicate which of the agile practices that might be more prone to not work as intended, when the team struggles with interpersonal conflict. Therefore, I argue that members of agile teams need training in conflict resolution techniques in order to lower the risk of interpersonal conflict negatively affecting team productivity.
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| 30. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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The Prospects of a Quantitative Measurement of Agility: A Validation Study on an Agile Maturity Model
- 2015
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier BV. - 0164-1212 .- 1873-1228. ; 107, s. 38-49
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Agile development has now become a well-known approach to collaboration in professional work life. Both researchers and practitioners want validated tools to measure agility. This study sets out to validate an agile maturity measurement model with statistical tests and empirical data. First, a pretest was conducted as a case study including a survey and focus group. Second, the main study was conducted with 45 employees from two SAP customers in the US. We used internal consistency (by a Cronbach’s alpha) as the main measure for reliability and analyzed construct validity by exploratory principal factor analysis (PFA). The results suggest a new categorization of a subset of items existing in the tool and provides empirical support for these new groups of factors. However, we argue that more work is needed to reach the point where a maturity models with quantitative data can be said to validly measure agility, and even then, such a measurement still needs to include some deeper analysis with cultural and contextual items.
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| 31. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
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The systems approach to change and the agile software development context
- 2016
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- There is a diversity of models explaining organizational culture and how these complex aspects can be addressed in connection to organizational change efforts. This workshop paper claims that models already exist for dealing with the cultural change that an agile transition is in the software engineering context. Instead of realizing this again through agile success stories, and thus reinventing the wheel, it is argued that the research in the software engineering field should build on these models instead and investigate how/if they differ. Practitioners already work as the change agents described in other fields and they should get recognition through the presence and integration of these models in the software engineering process research.
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| 32. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Trying to Increase the Mature Use of Agile Practices by Group Development Psychology Training - An Experiment
- 2016
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Ingår i: 4th International Workshop on Quantitative Approaches to Software Quality (QuASoQ). - : CEUR. - 1613-0073.
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- There has been some evidence that agility is connected to the group maturity of software development teams. This study aims at conducting group development psychology training with student teams, participating in a project course at university, and compare their group effectiveness score to their agility usage over time in a longitudinal design. Seven XP student teams were measured twice (43+40), which means 83 data points divided into two groups (an experimental group and one control group). The results showed that the agility measurement was not possible to increase by giving a 1.5-hour of group psychology lecture and discussion over a two-month period. The non-significant result was probably due to the fact that 1.5 hours of training were not enough to change the work methods of these student teams, or, a causal relationship does not exist between the two concepts. A third option could be that the experiential setting of real teams, even at a university, has many more variables not taken into account in this experiment that affect the two concepts. We therefore have no conclusions to draw based on the expected effects. However, we believe these concepts have to be connected since agile software development is based on teamwork to a large extent, but there are probable many more confounding or mediating factors.
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| 33. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
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Understanding work practices of autonomous agile teams: A social-psychological review
- 2020
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Ingår i: Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming – Workshops. XP 2020. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. - Cham : Springer, Cham. - 1865-1348 .- 1865-1356. - 9783030588571
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The purpose of this paper is to suggest additional aspects of social psychology that could help when making sense of autonomous agile teams. To make use of well-tested theories in social psychology and instead see how they replicated and differ in the autonomous agile team context would avoid reinventing the wheel. This was done, as an initial step, through looking at some very common agile practices and relate them to existing findings in social-psychological research. The two theories found that I argue could be more applied to the software engineering context are social identity theory and group socialization theory. The results show that literature provides social-psychological reasons for the popularity of some agile practices, but that scientific studies are needed to gather empirical evidence on these under-researched topics. Understanding deeper psychological theories could provide a better understanding of the psychological processes when building autonomous agile team, which could then lead to better predictability and intervention in relation to human factors.
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| 34. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Useful statistical methods for human factors research in software engineering: A discussion on validation with quantitative data
- 2016
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering. - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 9781450341554
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper we describe the usefulness of statistical validation techniques for human factors survey research. We need to investigate a diversity of validity aspects when creating metrics in human factors research, and we argue that the statistical tests used in other fields to get support for reliability and construct validity in surveys, should also be applied to human factors research in software engineering more often. We also show briefly how such methods can be applied (Test-Retest, Cronbach's α, and Exploratory Factor Analysis).
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| 35. |
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| 36. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(författare)
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Using the Work and Organizational Psychology Perspective in Research on Agile Software Development Teams
- 2015
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Background: The development of software has gone from more strict plan-driven projects to involve more human interaction and communication due to approaches like agile software development. With the realization of the importance of psychological aspect comes the possibility of learning from other more established research fields instead of reinventing the wheel. Objective: In the field of work and organizational psychology there is an extensive body of knowledge of work-life in many different contexts. The objective of this thesis is to show some examples of how both methods and models from psychology research can be used in software engineering and specifically to understand agile software development teams. The selected models and tools were; new aspects of work motivation in agile teams in larger organizations, statistical tests of validation (factor analysis), and using the social psychology model of group development in connection to agile teams. Method: The appended papers consist of both exploratory, correlative and validation studies. The research methods range from interviews, focus groups, and survey data as well as qualitative and quantitative interpretations. Eight companies participated consisting of two European-based and six US-based organizations, and a total of 76 people participated in the studies. The data collection procedures were also diverse ranging from recorded in-person interviews and focus groups, to online surveys and remotely recorded phone interviews. Results: The analysis included thematic ditto of interview transcripts, correlation of variables in survey data, and statistical validation tests of a survey itself. Some studies used one research methodology while other triangulate the research question in order to increase the validity of the results. The results strongly indicate that many agile maturity models need more validation, that there are work motivational aspects of employees working on agile teams in a more traditional structure, and that the group development aspect of building agile teams contributes with concrete guidance on moving teams forward. Conclusions: We conclude that there are a set of useful methods and models in work and organizational psychology that are applicable, specifically, to the agile software development context of teams, but also, more generally to a larger perspective of software engineering that involves human factors. This thesis will hopefully convince researchers and practitioners of the usefulness of adding the psychological dimension when trying to understand such social and complex systems.
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| 37. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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What an Agile Leader Does: The Group Dynamics Perspective
- 2020
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Ingår i: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. - Cham : Springer International Publishing. - 1865-1356 .- 1865-1348. - 9783030493912 ; 383 LNBIP, s. 178-194
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- When large industrial organizations change to (or start with) an agile approach to operations, managers and some employees are supposed to be “agile leaders” often without being given a clear definition of what that comprises when building agile teams. An inductive thematic analysis was used to investigate what 15 appointed leaders actually do and perceive as challenges regarding group dynamics working with an agile approach. Team maturity, Team design, and Culture and mindset were all categories of challenges related to group dynamics that the practitioners face and manage in their work-life that are not explicitly mentioned in the more process-focused agile transformation frameworks. The results suggest that leader mitigation of these three aspects of group dynamics is essential to the success of an agile transformation.
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| 38. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984-, et al.
(författare)
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What Makes Effective Leadership in Agile Software Development Teams?
- 2022
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Ingår i: International Conference on Software Engineering. - New York, NY, USA : IEEE Computer Society. - 9781450392211 ; , s. 2402-2414
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Effective leadership is one of the key drivers of business and project success, and one of the most active areas of management research. But how does leadership work in agile software development, which emphasizes self-management and self-organization and marginalizes traditional leadership roles? To find out, this study examines agile leadership from the perspective of thirteen professionals who identify as agile leaders, in different roles, at ten different software development companies of varying sizes. Data from semi-structured interviews reveals that leadership: (1) is dynamically shared among team members; (2) engenders a sense of belonging to the team; and (3) involves balancing competing organizational cultures (e.g. balancing the new agile culture with the old milestone-driven culture). In other words, agile leadership is a property of a team, not a role, and effectiveness depends on agile team members' identifying with the team, accepting responsibility, and being sensitive to cultural conflict.
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| 39. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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What software engineering can learn from research on affect in social psychology
- 2019
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM 4th International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering, SEmotion 2019. - : IEEE/ACM. ; , s. 38-41
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Social psychology researchers have, traditionally, focused on the construct of thinking rather than on feeling. Since the beginning of the 21st century, social science researchers have, however, increasingly explored the effects of affect. Their work has repeatedly recognized that affects play a crucial role in determining people's behavior. In this short paper, we argue that software engineering studies on affect would benefit from using more of the knowledge that social science researchers have acquired. Without accounting for their findings, we risk re-inventing the wheel. Also, without a profound understanding of the complex interplay between social context and affect, we risk creating overly simplistic solutions that might have considerable long-term adverse effects for software engineers.
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| 40. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Work Motivational Challenges Regarding the Interface Between Agile Teams and a Non-Agile Surrounding Organization: A case study
- 2014
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Ingår i: Agile Conference (AGILE), 2014. July 28 2014-Aug.. - : IEEE Press. - 9780769552224 ; , s. 11-15
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- There are studies showing what happens if agile teams are introduced into a non-agile organization, e.g. higher overhead costs and the necessity of an understanding of agile methods even outside the teams. This case study shows an example of work motivational aspects that might surface when an agile team exists in the middle of a more traditional structure. This case study was conducted at a car manufacturer in Sweden, consisting of an unstructured interview with the Scrum Master and a semi-structured focus group. The results show that the teams felt that the feedback from the surrounding organization was unsynchronized resulting in them not feeling appreciated when delivering their work. Moreover, they felt frustrated when working on non-agile teams after have been working on agile ones. This study concludes that there were work motivational affects of fitting an agile team into a non-agile surrounding organization, and therefore this might also be true for other organizations.
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| 41. |
- Lenberg, Per, 1976, et al.
(författare)
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Behavioral Aspects of Safety-Critical Software Development
- 2020
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops, ICSEW 2020. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; , s. 173-176
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We are becoming increasingly dependent on software systems also for highly critical tasks in society. To minimize the risk of failures, regulatory institutions define standards that software organizations must meet. However, the quality of the safety-critical software is, ultimately, determined by the software engineers' behavior. Even though previous studies have recognized the significance of such behavioral aspects, research that studies them is limited. The aim of this initial study was, therefore, to identify how and in what way, behavioral aspects affect the quality of safety-critical software. Thematic analysis of interviews with six software engineers identified four themes linking developer behavior to safety. Our analysis suggests that developing safety-critical systems imposes stress on software engineers and that to reduce such pressure it is critical to enhance organizational trust. It also indicates that the agile way-of-working has the potential to improve safety by facilitating the sharing of domain knowledge. Our findings provide directions for future studies into these important aspects and can be of wider relevance, in particular for the development of secure software, but potentially also for general software engineering.
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| 42. |
- Lenberg, Per, et al.
(författare)
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Qualitative software engineering research : Reflections and guidelines
- 2024
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Ingår i: Journal of Software. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 2047-7473 .- 2047-7481. ; 36:6
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Researchers are increasingly recognizing the importance of human aspects in software development. Because qualitative methods are used to explore human behavior in-depth, we believe that studies using such methods will become more common. Existing qualitative software engineering guidelines do not cover the full breadth of qualitative methods and the knowledge on how to use them like in social sciences. The purpose of this study was to extend the software engineering community's current body of knowledge regarding available qualitative methods and their quality assurance frameworks and to provide recommendations and guidelines for their use. With the support of an epistemological argument and a survey of the literature, we suggest that future research would benefit from (1) utilizing a broader set of research methods, (2) more strongly emphasizing reflexivity, and (3) employing qualitative guidelines and quality criteria. We present an overview of three qualitative methods commonly used in social sciences but rarely seen in software engineering research, namely interpretative phenomenological analysis, narrative analysis, and discourse analysis. Furthermore, we discuss the meaning of reflexivity in relation to the software engineering context and suggest means of fostering it. Our paper will help software engineering researchers better select and then guide the application of a broader set of qualitative research methods. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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| 43. |
- Mellblom, Emanuel, et al.
(författare)
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The Connection between Burnout and Personality Types in Software Developers
- 2019
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Ingår i: IEEE Software. - 1937-4194 .- 0740-7459. ; 36:5, s. 57-64
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article examines the connection between the five-factor model personality traits and burnout in software developers and aims to validate generalizations of findings in other fields.
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| 44. |
- Torkar, Richard, 1971, et al.
(författare)
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A Method to Assess and Argue for Practical Significance in Software Engineering
- 2022
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - : IEEE Computer Society. - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520. ; 48:6, s. 2053-2065
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A key goal of empirical research in software engineering is to assess practical significance, which answers the question whether the observed effects of some compared treatments show a relevant difference in practice in realistic scenarios. Even though plenty of standard techniques exist to assess statistical significance, connecting it to practical significance is not straightforward or routinely done; indeed, only a few empirical studies in software engineering assess practical significance in a principled and systematic way. In this paper, we argue that Bayesian data analysis provides suitable tools to assess practical significance rigorously. We demonstrate our claims in a case study comparing different test techniques. The case study's data was previously analyzed (Afzal et al., 2015) using standard techniques focusing on statistical significance. Here, we build a multilevel model of the same data, which we fit and validate using Bayesian techniques. Our method is to apply cumulative prospect theory on top of the statistical model to quantitatively connect our statistical analysis output to a practically meaningful context. This is then the basis both for assessing and arguing for practical significance. Our study demonstrates that Bayesian analysis provides a technically rigorous yet practical framework for empirical software engineering. A substantial side effect is that any uncertainty in the underlying data will be propagated through the statistical model, and its effects on practical significance are made clear. Thus, in combination with cumulative prospect theory, Bayesian analysis supports seamlessly assessing practical significance in an empirical software engineering context, thus potentially clarifying and extending the relevance of research for practitioners.
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| 45. |
- Torkar, Richard, 1971, et al.
(författare)
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Statistical and practical significance of empirical software engineering research: A maturity model
- 2017
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Software engineering research is maturing and papers increasingly support their arguments with empirical data from a multitude of sources, using statistical tests to judge if and to what degree empirical evidence supports their hypotheses. This paper presents trends and current state of art regarding statistical maturity in empirical software engineering research; the objective being the development of a statistical maturity model. First, we manually reviewed papers from four well-known and top ranked journals producing a review protocol along with the view of current (2015) state of art concerning statistical maturity, practical significance and reproducibility of empirical software engineering research. Our protocol was then used as ground truth, i.e., training set, for a semi-automatic classification of studies for the years 2001--2015 using a total of 3,011 papers. We used the extracted data to develop a statistical maturity model which also includes a model for how to argue for practical significance. The statistical maturity of empirical software engineering research has an upward trend in certain areas (e.g., use of nonparametric statistics, but also more generally in the usage of quantitative analysis). However, we also see how our research area currently often fails to connect the statistical analysis to practical significance. For instance, we argue that conclusions should explicitly state contributions to software engineering practice, e.g., the return on investment for practitioners. We argue that the statistical maturity model can be used by researchers and practitioners to build a coherent statistical analysis and guide them in the choice of statistical approaches of its steps. The final goal for a researcher would be to, in a clearer way, present and argue for the practical significance of their findings. Bayesian analysis, we believe, has a role to play in this.
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