| 1. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(author)
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On the relation between unit testing and code quality
- 2017
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In: Proceedings - 43rd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, SEAA 2017. - : IEEE. ; , s. 52-56
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)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. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(author)
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A fourth explanation to Brooks' Law - The aspect of group developmental psychology
- 2017
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In: 2017 Ieee/Acm 10th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (Chase 2017). - : IEEE. - 9781538640395
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)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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| 3. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(author)
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Group development and group maturity when building agile teams: A qualitative and quantitative investigation at eight large companies
- 2017
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In: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier BV. - 0164-1212 .- 1873-1228. ; 124, s. 104-119
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)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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| 4. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(author)
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Group developmental psychology and software development performance
- 2017
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In: IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion, ICSE-C 2017. 20-28 May 2017, Buenos Aires, Argentina. - : IEEE. - 9781538615898
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)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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| 5. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984, et al.
(author)
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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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In: 2017 Ieee/Acm 10th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (Chase 2017). - : IEEE.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)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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| 6. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(author)
-
Psychological group processes when building agile software development teams
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 7. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(author)
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Social Influence in Agile Requirements Engineering
- 2017
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In: Proceedings of the Work in Progress Session held in connection with the 43rd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA). - 9783902457486
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)
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| 8. |
- Gren, Lucas, 1984
(author)
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The links between agile practices, interpersonal conflict, and perceived productivity
- 2017
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In: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; Part F128635, s. 292-297
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)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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| 9. |
- Torkar, Richard, 1971, et al.
(author)
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Statistical and practical significance of empirical software engineering research: A maturity model
- 2017
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)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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