The changing balance of technology and process: A case study on a combined setting of model‐driven development and classical C coding

Abstract

The increasing flexibility in industry leads to an ecosystem of change, affecting the balance of processes and technology as well as the developers who have to cope with the change. Furthermore, the change itself might impact the ability to use quantitative methods to learn from previous experience. The goal of this study is to better understand the ecosystem of mutual impacts and changes of process and technologies as well as how developers perceive a technology setting and deal with its change. Therefore, we conducted a case study at Ericsson, performing a series of interviews among 6 employees (senior developers and architects). We identified a time line of changes that happened over 7 years. A set of observations about the relation between processes and tooling, and observations about developer's perceptions of the technology settings, and their strategy to deal with these changing technology settings. We discuss how the observed change impacts the ability to perform quantitative evaluations of technology and processes. The findings show that a bad choice of technologies can lead to unexpected impact on team dynamics. Furthermore, change happens so regular that it needs to be considered when collecting data for a quantitative evaluation of, eg, productivity. KEYWORDScase study, development technologies, empirical investigation, software process INTRODUCTIONToday, it is well understood that processes are not fixed constructs and need tailoring to fit the needs of a company or project. 1 Furthermore, we know today that processes change with time, which can not only be due to changing needs but also due to hopes that developers or management put into the new processes. Thus, companies want to be able to freely choose their processes and team structures. Technology and process/team interaction can trigger mutual changes. Continuous changes in both, however, might impact the ability to judge about the development environment Objective To learn more about these aspects, we performed a qualitative study with Ericsson.‡ We considered a specific product which parts are built with the help of 2 alternative settings of development technologies. The situation is the result of a history of changes. This constellation has the major advantage that the same developers have often worked with both settings and experiences them within the same conditions, including corporate culture and organizational structure.Contribution For the study, we interviewed 6 employees of Ericsson (senior developers and system architects).First of all, we were able to collect information about changes in context of both settings of used technologies, ie, concerning the technologies themselves, partially surrounding techniques and the applied process, including the timing of activities and iterations as well as the team interaction (1 in Figure 1). This way we could come up with a time line that shows how regularly the studied development environment was subject to change. § Second, the collected data allowed us to make 6 observations on the...

What Makes Agile Software Development Agile?

“…Process Evolution: We investigated how technology and processes co-evolve over time [74], [75]. A main finding is that technological changes are likely to change processes as well.…”