Catching up with Method and Process Practice: An Industry-Informed Baseline for Researchers

Klünder, Jil; Hebig, Regina; Tell, Paolo; Kuhrmann, Marco; Nakatumba‐Nabende, Joyce; Heldal, Rogardt; Krusche, Stephan; Fazal-Baqaie, Masud; Felderer, Michael; Bocco, Marcela Fabiana Genero; Küpper, Steffen; Licorish, Sherlock A.; López, Gustavo; McCaffery, Fergal; Top, Özden Özcan; Prause, Christian R.; Prikladnicki, Rafael; Tüzün, Eray; Pfahl, Dietmar; Schneider, Kurt; MacDonell, Stephen G.

doi:10.1109/icse-seip.2019.00036

Cited by 38 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…From our perspective, the most urgent question is for the actual role of methods, for instance: What is the value of stating that someone, for example, uses Scrum, when no one does it by the book? What are the implications for devising a particular method if, in practice, the method starts evolving 16 into a hybrid? What are the implications for software process improvement (SPI) programs if, regardless of the “showroom method” providing the umbrella, the practices are the stable key components of organizing and conducting the actual project work?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards the statistical construction of hybrid development methods

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Klünder

Küpper

et al. 2020

J Software Evolu Process

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Hardly any software development process is used as prescribed by authors or standards. Regardless of company size or industry sector, a majority of project teams and companies use hybrid development methods (short: hybrid methods) that combine different development methods and practices. Even though such hybrid methods are highly individualized, a common understanding of how to systematically construct synergetic practices is missing. In this article, we make a first step towards a statistical construction procedure for hybrid methods. Grounded in 1467 data points from a large-scale practitioner survey, we study the question: What are hybrid methods made of and how can they be systematically constructed? Our findings show that only eight methods and few practices build the core of modern software development. Using an 85% agreement level in the participants' selections, we provide examples illustrating how hybrid methods can be characterized by the practices they are made of. Furthermore, using this characterization, we develop an initial construction procedure, which allows for defining a method frame and enriching it incrementally to devise a hybrid method using ranked sets of practice. K E Y W O R D S hybrid methods, software development, software process, survey research 1 | INTRODUCTION Today, companies often use highly individualized processes to run projects, often by integrating agile methods in their processes. For instance, Dikert et al 1 found choosing and customizing an agile model to be an important success factor and that agility in general changed the way software is developed. Dingsøyr et al 2 reflect on a decade of agile methodologies, and there is no denial that agile methods have become an important asset in many companies' process portfolios. 3-6 However, agile methods are not implemented as prescribed by authors or standards, 7,8 and in 2011, West et al 9 coined the term "Water-Scrum-Fall" to describe a pattern that they claimed most companies implement for their software projects.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards the statistical construction of hybrid development methods

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Klünder

Küpper

et al. 2020

J Software Evolu Process

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“…The HELENA survey asked questions on how software organizations develop their software and what processes are used [7]. All published studies [37][38][39][40][41][42][43] share the same general theme and use the same data sample, although they have different scope, variables, and designs. Our study is concerned with hybrid approaches in the context of GSD.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plan-Driven Approaches Are Alive and Kicking in Agile Global Software Development

Marinho

Noll

Richardson

et al. 2019

2019 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM)

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Background: Agile methods are no longer restricted to small projects and co-located teams. The last decade has seen the spread of agile into large scale, distributed and regulated domains. Many case studies show successful agile adoption in GSD, however, taken as a whole, it remains unclear how widespread this trend is, and what form the agile adoption takes in a global software development (GSD) setting. Aims: Our objective is to gain a deeper understanding of how organisations adopt agile development methods in distributed settings. Specifically we aim to plot the current development process landscape in GSD. Method: We analyse industrial survey data from 33 different countries collected as part of the HELENA project that explored the wider use of hybrid development approaches in software development. We extract and analyse the results of 263 surveys completed by participants involved in globally distributed projects. Results: In our sample, 72% of globally distributed projects implement a mix of both agile and traditional approaches (termed 'hybrid'). 25% of GSD organisations are predominantly agile, with only very few (5%) opting for traditional approaches. GSD projects that used only agile methods tended to be very large. Conclusions: Globally Distributed Software Development (and project size) is not a barrier to adopting agile practices. Yet, to facilitate project coordination and general project management, many adopt traditional approaches, resulting in a hybrid approach that follows defined rules.

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“…Therefore, we argue that there must be further factors influencing the choice of development methods, which could explain why the definition of a suitable development method is that complicated. As shown in [19], most development methods emerge from experience. However, experience can only take effect when having "something" in place that can be adjusted based on experience, whereas starting from scratch is difficult.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Determining Context Factors for Hybrid Development Methods with Trained Models

Klünder

Karajic

Tell

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the International Conference on Software and System Processes

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Selecting a suitable development method for a specific project context is one of the most challenging activities in process design. Every project is unique and, thus, many context factors have to be considered. Recent research took some initial steps towards statistically constructing hybrid development methods, yet, paid little attention to the peculiarities of context factors influencing method and practice selection. In this paper, we utilize exploratory factor analysis and logistic regression analysis to learn such context factors and to identify methods that are correlated with these factors. Our analysis is based on 829 data points from the HELENA dataset. We provide five base clusters of methods consisting of up to 10 methods that lay the foundation for devising hybrid development methods. The analysis of the five clusters using trained models reveals only a few context factors, e.g., project/product size and target application domain, that seem to significantly influence the selection of methods. An extended descriptive analysis of these practices in the context of the identified method clusters also suggests a consolidation of the relevant practice sets used in specific project contexts.

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Catching up with Method and Process Practice: An Industry-Informed Baseline for Researchers

Cited by 38 publications

References 17 publications

Towards the statistical construction of hybrid development methods

Towards the statistical construction of hybrid development methods

Plan-Driven Approaches Are Alive and Kicking in Agile Global Software Development

Determining Context Factors for Hybrid Development Methods with Trained Models

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