Note that none of these had any empirical evidence to back them. Moreover, Beck described in his original proposal that these ideas were best for "outsourced or in-house development of small- to medium-sized systems where requirements are vague and likely to change", but as industry often does, it began hyping it as a universal solution to software project management woes and adopted all kinds of combinations of these ideas, adapting them to their existing processes. In reality, the value of XP appears to depend on highly project-specific factors (Müller & Padberk 2013), while the core ideas that industry has adopted are valuing feedback, communication, simplicity, and respect for individuals and the team (Sharp & Robinson 2004). Researchers continue to investigate the merits of the list above; for example, numerous studies have investigated the effects of pair programming on defects, finding small but measurable benefits (di Bella et al. 2012)
-At the same time, Beck began also espousing the idea of "Agile" methods, which celebrated many of the values underlying Extreme Programming, such as focusing on individuals, keeping things simple, collaborating with customers, and being iterative. This idea of begin agile was even more popular and spread widely in industry and research, even though many of the same ideas appeared much earlier in Boehm's work on the Spiral model. Researchers found that Agile methods can increase developer enthusiasm (Syed-Abdulla et al. 2006), that agile teams need different roles such as Mentor, Co-ordinator, Translator, Champion, Promoter, and Terminator (Hoda et al. 2010), and that teams are combing agile methods with all kinds of process ideas from other project management frameworks such as Scrum (meet daily to plan work, plan two-week sprints, maintain a backlog of work) and Kanban (visualize the workflow, limit work-in-progress, manage flow, make policies explicit, and implement feedback loops) (Al-Baik & Miller 2015). I don't define any of these ideas here because there aren't standard definitions to share.
+At the same time, Beck began also espousing the idea of "Agile" methods, which celebrated many of the values underlying Extreme Programming, such as focusing on individuals, keeping things simple, collaborating with customers, and being iterative. This idea of begin agile was even more popular and spread widely in industry and research, even though many of the same ideas appeared much earlier in Boehm's work on the Spiral model. Researchers found that Agile methods can increase developer enthusiasm (Syed-Abdulla et al. 2006), that agile teams need different roles such as Mentor, Co-ordinator, Translator, Champion, Promoter, and Terminator (Hoda et al. 2010), and that teams are combing agile methods with all kinds of process ideas from other project management frameworks such as Scrum (meet daily to plan work, plan two-week sprints, maintain a backlog of work) and Kanban (visualize the workflow, limit work-in-progress, manage flow, make policies explicit, and implement feedback loops) (Al-Baik & Miller 2015). Research has also found that transitioning a team to Agile methods is slow and complex because it requires everyone on a team to change their behavior, beliefs, and practices (Hoda & Noble 2017).
Ultimately, all of this energy around process ideas in industry is exciting, but disorganized. None of these efforts really get to the core of what makes software projects difficult to manage. One effort in research to get to this core by contributing new theories that explain these difficulties. The first is Herbsleb's Socio-Technical Theory of Coordination (STTC). The idea of the theory is quite simple: technical dependencies in engineering decisions (e.g., this function calls this other function, this data type stores this other data type) define the social constraints that the organization must solve in a variety of ways to build and maintain software (Herbsleb & Mockus 2003, Herbsleb 2016). The better the organization builds processes and awareness tools to ensure that the people who own those engineering dependencies are communicating and aware of each others' work, the fewer defects that will occur. Herbsleb referred this alignment as sociotechnical congruence, and conducted a number of studies demonstrating its predictive and explanatory power.
@@ -88,6 +88,7 @@James D. Herbsleb and Audris Mockus. 2003. Formulation and preliminary test of an empirical theory of coordination in software engineering. In Proceedings of the 9th European software engineering conference held jointly with 11th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering (ESEC/FSE-11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 138-137.
James Herbsleb. 2016. Building a socio-technical theory of coordination: why and how. In Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2016). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2-10.
Rashina Hoda, James Noble, and Stuart Marshall. 2010. Organizing self-organizing teams. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1 (ICSE '10), Vol. 1. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 285-294.
+Hoda, R., & Noble, J. (2017). Becoming agile: a grounded theory of agile transitions in practice. In Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 141-151). IEEE Press.
Andrew J. Ko, Robert DeLine, and Gina Venolia. 2007. Information Needs in Collocated Software Development Teams. In Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '07). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 344-353.
Andrew J. Ko (2017). A Three-Year Participant Observation of Software Startup Software Evolution. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Software Engineering in Practice, to appear.
Ekrem Kocaguneli, Thomas Zimmermann, Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, and Tim Menzies. 2013. Distributed development considered harmful? In Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '13). IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 882-890.