accepted Research Papers

Full research paper presentations are spread across the conference program and are scheduled within stages most closely related to the topic of the paper. These include research presentations at Enterprise Agile; Dev Ops; Culture, People & Teams; Lean Principles and Practices; Leadership and Organizational Transformation; and Research Cafe stages. See details below.

All short and position research paper presentations will be held as a part of a Poster Madness session in the Research Cafe stage, along with an Open Space. See Research Cafe for more information.
 

Full Research Papers

  • Influences on Agile Practice Tailoring in Enterprise Software Development
    Julian Bass, Robert Gordon University, United Kingdom 
    [Enterprise Agile Stage: 19th Sunday, 10:45-11:15]

    "Distributed agile development projects have become a reality in large enterprises using offshore development models. A case study involving seven international companies with offices in Bangalore, India, and London, UK was conducted, including interviews with 19 practitioners. The contribution of this paper is to illustrate the reasons for tailoring Agile practices within the context of large enterprises. The findings show that scrum roles and practices did not conflict with enterprise policies or processes and were thought improve product quality and productivity. However, agile practices from the XP tradition were not so widely adopted. Test driven development did not integrate well within enterprises where independent quality assurance teams were constituted as separate departments. Continuous integration was found to be challenging where enterprise software products required time consuming regression testing and elaborate code release processes. While adoption coding standards and collective code ownership are necessary to facilitate interaction between disparate stakeholder groups."
     
  • Implementing the Lean concepts of Continuous Improvement and Flow on an Agile Software Development Project - An Industrial Case Study
    Balachander Swaminathan and Karuna Jain, IIT Bombay, India
    [Lean Principles and Practices Stage: 17th Friday, 02:15-02:45]

    "The idea of applying lean principles to software development has been gathering a lot of interest over the last decade. Several books have been published exploring the lessons learned from manufacturing around lean. Some books have also taken the principles of lean manufacturing and provided the guidelines for adapting the same to software development. However, there is still a huge need for providing empirical evidence of application of lean principles to software development through real case studies. This paper attempts at making a contribution in that direction, by exploring the implementation of the ideas of continuous improvement and flow, which are so central to lean, on a real life industrial project. Besides exploring the practices that aid these concepts in agile software development, this paper also discusses some of the metrics that can be used for measuring and tracking progress of such a project. The study shows that applying the concepts of continuous improvement and flow to agile software development does seem to have significant benefits, and is something that needs to be extended further and applied to different project situations."
     
  • Investigating Equity of Participation in Pair Programming
    Laura Plonka, Judith Segal, Helen Sharp and Janet Van Der Linden    
    The Open University, United Kingdom
    [Culture, People & Teams Stage: 17th Friday, 04:00-04:30]

    "Pair Programming (PP) is a software development practice where two programmers share a mouse and keyboard while working together on one computer. A concern among some practitioners is that PP might be a waste of resources if developers have a very low equity of participation, for example, when one developer is doing all the work and the other is not contributing at all. This paper investigates this concern by analysing the equity of participation in industrial pair programming sessions. It quantifies two different types of contributions; verbal contributions and driving contributions. As a result, we found that two thirds of the PP sessions are not equitable. Based on interviews with the developers, we analyse which factors influence the equity of participation. We found that the choice of the workstation, personal preferences, PP experience, work style and skill differences influence who is driving. Additionally, we discuss the implications of sessions that are not equitable and whether the concept of equity of participation could be used as metric to evaluate PP."
     
  • Emergence of Agile Methods: Perceptions from Software Practitioners in Malaysia
    Ani Liza Asnawi, Andrew M Gravell and Gary B Wills
    University of Southampton, United Kingdom    
    [Leadership and Organizational Transformation Stage: 18th Saturday, 01:15-01:45]

    "Agile methods are an established process for developing software nowadays. There is, however, less evidence on its usage among software practitioners in Malaysia. While the methods have become mainstream in other regions, that is not the case in this country. This paper empirically investigates the perceptions of Agile methods usage from seven organisations involving 14 software practitioners in Malaysia. Our participants are using Scrum and have a maximum of five years experience. We categorised our findings in terms of awareness, introduction, and challenges they are facing, together with the suggested and practiced solution from them. Interestingly, a change in mind set when practicing Agile was identified to be helpful in reducing the challenges. Lastly we present the practices in Agile they perceived to deliver the most benefits. We found that the use of Agile is still emerging in the country, and awareness is still lacking especially within the government sector. Although several challenges have been encountered when introducing Agile in their organisations, the benefits of Agile are reported to be in Agile practices such as: the involvement from all parties from the beginning, daily stand-up meeting, iterative and incremental, applying burn down chart, sprint and continuous integration. We aim to provide awareness and knowledge about Agile methods to the practitioners in the country and the nearby region. This paper can serve as a reference to the early adopters who intend to use Agile methods in the future."
     
  • Integration Analysis of Security Activities from the perspective of agility
    Sonia and Archana Singhal, University of Delhi, India   
    [Research Cafe: 19th Sunday, 11:15-11:45]

    "To combat the increasing trends of security breaches reported nowadays, there is a need to deploy strict security activities with various development methodologies. In the present work we are focusing on an extremely popular agile development Methodology. These methodologies are informal and lightweight in nature having short timescales. But integration of security activities with agile activities always falls short of expectations, as security practices are not able to adapt such characteristics possessed by agile software easily. Therefore, in this paper we keep a step further for injecting security activities with agile methodologies. Here we propose a novel approach which provides quantitative measure of agility for security activities in terms of real agility degree (RAD). It determines the degree of compatibility of a security activity with agile process. We have also presented a comparative analysis of security activities with each other in context of RAD and risk removal efficiency of a security activity."

  • Comparative Experiments of Agile Software Development
    Keiko Shimazu, KEIO University, Japan
    [Dev Ops Stage: 18th Saturday, 05:00-05:30]

    "This paper reports the result of comparative experiments, in order to confirm efficiency and effectiveness of introducing Vee model as a agile development template. This method is efficient to identify the items in ConOps (Concept of OPerationS), a standard provided by IEEE. The main purpose of the chart is to execute the requirement development process sufficiently, which is in the Concept Stage within the service lifecycle, without increasing the cost. Utilizing this chart also reduces the extra costs of the Development Stage caused by errors that are extremely difficult to estimate during the planning phase. High quality service system won’t have cost overrun problem in any phase. We established two identical enterprise service systems each using different cases and compared their development costs. The first case is to proceed with systems architecture development and systems designing based on the initial requirements provided by sponsors and then move on to the Development Stage. The second case is to use Vee model as an agile development template. The result of those experimental studies demonstrated effectiveness of the model, according to show extremely improvement on the aspect of time period and costs."
     
  • Agile Practices in Higher Education: A Case Study
    Venkatesh Kamat and Shailaja Sardessai, Goa University, India    
    [Research Cafe: 19th Sunday, 10:45-11:15]

    "Indian higher education is looking forward to major reforms. In the past, much of the efforts to bring in reforms have proved to be counter productive. There is so much of wastage of talent and resources that one is compelled to think whether the agile practices that have met with so much of success in manufacturing and in software industry can be of any help in education sector as well. With this guided inquiry we carried out an experiment to practice few of these principles and the results are very encouraging. In this paper we discuss the motivation behind applying agile practices in higher education and the methodology adopted by us with the help of a case study."

Short Research Papers >> Research Cafe: 19th Sunday, 10:00-14:15

 
  • How much architecture? Reducing the up-front effort
    Michael Waterman, James Noble and George Allan    
    Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

     
    "A key part of software architecture is the design of the high level structure of a software system – an exercise in planning ahead. Agile software development methods discourage 
    planning ahead, encapsulated by the Agile Manifesto philosophy “[we value] responding to change over following a plan”. Development without architecture planning risks failure. This leads to a paradox: how can you plan ahead while using a methodology that promotes not planning ahead? This paper introduces Grounded Theory research that is exploring the use of architecture in agile methodologies by industry practitioners. Early results show that the experience of the architects and predefined or template architectures both help to reduce the architectural effort required in a development project."
     
  • Factor Analysis: Investigating Important Aspects for Agile Adoption in Malaysia
    Ani Liza Asnawi, Andrew M Gravell and Gary B Wills    
    University of Southampton, United Kingdom   

    "This paper focuses on identifying the important aspects of Agile adoption from software practitioners in Malaysia. We analyse 27 Agile adoption variables from a survey of early Agile users in Malaysia. Factor analysis is conducted to identify the clusters of the variables (or items) and how they are inter-related to produce factors. Most of the respondents are from software organisations in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor; in which most of the companies are located in Malaysia. The clusters of variables resulting from this analysis can serve as a reference to the practitioners planning to adopt the methodology. The top factors identified from this study are shown in terms of (i) developer involvement and organisation-related aspects, (ii) cultural and people related aspects and (iii) customer collaboration and the need for professional skills when using Agile methods. In addition, factor analysis discovered that practitioners disagreed about the importance of the technical aspects of Agile. While we believe that these findings are particularly important from the Malaysian perspective, however, they also help add to the body of evidence in the field of software engineering and software process particularly in terms of Agile methods adoption. Moreover, the study also can help adopters from the nearby geographical regions to understand and see the suitability of Agile methods for their organisations."

  • Quality Assurance in Agile – Drive towards achieving excellence
    Sonali Bhasin, Nokia Siemens Networks, India

    "Agile Methods are known to have built-in quality management system, however there are still challenges seen in the real life scenarios within the software organizations that are transitioning from traditional method to Agile development methods. Traditional QA techniques are reporting based and rely on heavy weight inspection methods whereas Agile QA techniques are built-in daily activities by teams. Research proposal here aims to study various challenges faced in terms of assuring quality in Agile , what are the key drivers or indicators of Quality in agile and proposing the framework to evaluate what aspects of Agile improve the quality of the product in terms of bug rates , development time and costs. Through this study we aim to provide some suggestions to help organizations overcome obstacles expected in adopting the agile method as software development tool and ensuring quality."
     
  • Using Scrum for Software Engineering Class Projects
    Ramrao Wagh, Goa University, India  

    "Imparting industry relevant skills and knowledge for the graduating students in the field of Software Engineering is difficult but is required to make the students employable and productive right from the joining. With outdated curriculum and slow process of revision of syllabi it is difficult to achieve this objective. This paper discusses how one of the popular project management frameworks, Scrum can be taught and used to teach basic concepts of project management without revising the syllabus. It discusses the rise in motivation and interest level of students due to adoption of this approach. It also shows the flexibility of this agile approach to adapt to a situation different than a normal software development scenario in an organization."

Position Papers >> Research Cafe: 19th Sunday, 10:00-14:15

  
  • Using Social Media for Collaborative Intelligence in Agile Projects
    Kissan Gauns Dessai and Ramrao Wagh    
    Shree Damodar College of Commerce & Economics, India

    "Delivering software solutions faster, better and cheaper remains to be one of the challenges in the software industry even today. The task of software developer is greatly simplified if any approach is available to them that will ensure better interactivity, collaboration, sharing and an optimal exploitation of collaborative intelligence. In the recent past more and more software enterprises are shifting towards light weight and agile methods to achieve the goal of rapid, cost effective and quality software. In this paper we propose use of the social media services for collaborative intelligence in agile projects. This approach will assist software practitioners to communicate with each other and community experts for sharing tacit knowledge to solve recurrent/demanding software tasks quickly. This is win-win approach that is focused towards sharing of intelligence and keeping it ready, Just-In-Case (JIC) it is required and/or creating solution, Just-In-Time (JIT) as and when needed. The anecdotal evidence suggest that any such approach where intelligence is shared collaboratively leads to solving problem quickly and comprehensively with less pressure on human resources and better productivity."
     
  • Model Evolution in Agile Software Development
    Qichao Liu, University of Alabama at Birmingham, United States

    "Agile software development is becoming popular in the industry area due to its good features for constructing software system. This paper is illustrating the necessity of conducting model evolution research in agile software development."
     
  • Improving Learning Outcome through Iterative Teaching/Learning Methodology
    Kissan Gauns Dessai, Shree Damodar College of Commerce & Economics, Goa, India


    "Student success is greatly determined by methodology adopted by teacher during teaching/learning process. In our current educational system teaching/learning is a one-way process where after teaching the set of course content, students are assessed and evaluated. The student’s performance is not used in analyzing the understanding level achieved by students and to improve their grey areas before finalizing the result. This paper proposes a novel iterative teaching/learning model for collaborative learning where students can relearn unclear topics & verify the understanding of those topics iteratively before undergoing derivative evaluation to test the amount of added knowledge gained/improve overall performance."
     
  • Does Agile Development Fit in the Actual Context of Software Quality?
    Célio Santana, Cristine Gusmao, Hélio Filho, Alexandre Vasconcelos
    Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, Brazil

    "Since 1968 computer science tried to adopt elements of the traditional engineering in order to address the problems of quality and failures in the development of information systems. Many software quality references such as CMMI or six sigma are based in traditional engineering. Agile development reveals that it is hard to meeting the changing requirements right up to the level of product deployment. This paper presents how agile development needs could compromise its relationship with traditional quality software approaches." 

conference program

12 Stages, 146 Sessions, 125 Speakers from 18 Countries.
Attend any session from the 7 Parallel Tracks.
Full conference program.

Attendees Profile

Professionals with 337 unique Roles from 228 different Companies from 21 Countries participated in the conference. Detailed profile of the attendees.

Program Contacts

Conference Chair: Naresh Jain
Program Chairs: Siddharta Govindaraj, Venkat Subramaniam
Research Chair: Rashina Hoda

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Sponsor Liaison: Naresh Jain — ASCI, India

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