Success and Failure Factors for Adopting a Combined Approach: A Case Study of Two Software Development Teams

Improving Agile Software Development using User-Centered Design and Lean Startup

“…The teams' focus on experimentation also ends up improving the integration effort: with the entirety of the team perceiving their development effort as a series of experiments, it is easier to convince themselves to go back to a design phase and adapt their product when there is data justifying as much, mitigating any resistance to process and culture change one would expect [37], in addition to helping chunking design [37] down into experiments. This was not as transparent to ORG stakeholders external to the team, however, as they were still resistant to the combined approach [12], even if the change to a discovery-oriented perspective forced the teams to build more rapport with stakeholders to properly uncover problems and define effective solutions.…”

“…Ever since the teams started working at the PUCRS lab, we have analyzed several aspects of this case, from comparing the teams' use of the combined approach to existing literature [32] to analyzing how experimentation takes place during their development process [9] and what are the success and failure factors to adopting the combined approach from the teams' perspective [12]. As previously mentioned, our goal is to better comprehend the combined approach with two main contributions in mind: practice-wise, to help ORG in devising and rolling out a reduced-cost transformation effort throughout their organization by understanding the intricacies of doing so; and academic-wise, to conceptually develop, in the long-run, what we dubbed as an ''acceleration'' model [33]-a model to assist in such kind of transformation effort by identifying what knowledge (e.g., on experimentation, on developing empathy with the user, on pair programming) is required for a software team to develop a certain product using the combined approach, diagnosing the gap between the required and the actual team knowledge, and offering support to follow-up on actions aiming to fill in this knowledge gap.…”

“…While the teams are consistently satisfied with the combined approach itself and its development results, they have expressed several concerns with ORG properly adhering to it due to culture clash [11]. The teams require a lot of autonomy to make proper use of the combined approach, but the rest of ORG is used to employing strict project deadlines and other rigid measures [12], affecting their development process. For instance, they were unable to deploy a solution for two months as managers claimed the production environment was unstable, and one of the participants feels like they will be pressured to abandon the combined approach if management does not take a stand for it at ORG's upper management decision levels [12].…”

“…We also highlight that both teams had the support of one another when using the combined approach, having been stationed in the same environment for this purpose. This fact could have made the use of the combined approach an easier and more fortunate endeavor-all negative statements reported by the teams were not made towards the combined approach itself, but instead to contextual organizational issues that interfered with it [12]. Nevertheless, the two teams had a substantial level of empowerment, granting them the autonomy to work as they saw fit in the two distinct software products they were each working on.…”

“…As the software industry continues to evolve so does what is needed to thrive in it, and ''fixing'' agile methods can be a way to achieve proper innovation and avoid the launch of undesirable Adopting the combined approach can be a costly journey, as it demands not only adherence to practices and technical capabilities for it to work, but employee mindset change as well. The combined approach advocates for the autonomy of teams [12] so they can effectively solve problems, which can clash with existing organizational mechanisms and culture, hindering the adopters' chance of a successful implementation of it. Although there are prerequisites mentioned in literature to adopting the combined approach and studies presenting models of it [8,10,13], we still know little about what changes take place at the development team level and how each pillar is manifested throughout the development process.…”