We present a case study on scaling Scrum in a large globally distributed software development project at Nokia, a global telecommunications company. We discuss how the case project scaled Scrum while growing from two collocated Scrum teams to 20 teams located in four countries and employing a total of 170 persons. Moreover, we report scaling challenges the case project faced during this 2,5 year journey. We gathered data by 19 semi-structured interviews of project personnel from two sites, interviewees comprising different roles including managers, architects, product owners, developers and testers. The project was highly successful from the business point of view, as agile enabled fast response to customer requirements. However, the project faced significant challenges in scaling Scrum despite attempts at applying the Large-scale Scrum (LeSS) framework. The organization experimented with different ways of implementing scaling practices like implementing common sprint planning meetings, Scrum-of-Scrums meetings, common demos and common retrospectives, as well as scaling the Product Owner role. We conclude the paper by reflecting on the scaling approach used in the case organization in contrast to the LeSS framework.
{"title":"Scaling Scrum in a Large Globally Distributed Organization: A Case Study","authors":"M. Paasivaara, C. Lassenius","doi":"10.1109/ICGSE.2016.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2016.34","url":null,"abstract":"We present a case study on scaling Scrum in a large globally distributed software development project at Nokia, a global telecommunications company. We discuss how the case project scaled Scrum while growing from two collocated Scrum teams to 20 teams located in four countries and employing a total of 170 persons. Moreover, we report scaling challenges the case project faced during this 2,5 year journey. We gathered data by 19 semi-structured interviews of project personnel from two sites, interviewees comprising different roles including managers, architects, product owners, developers and testers. The project was highly successful from the business point of view, as agile enabled fast response to customer requirements. However, the project faced significant challenges in scaling Scrum despite attempts at applying the Large-scale Scrum (LeSS) framework. The organization experimented with different ways of implementing scaling practices like implementing common sprint planning meetings, Scrum-of-Scrums meetings, common demos and common retrospectives, as well as scaling the Product Owner role. We conclude the paper by reflecting on the scaling approach used in the case organization in contrast to the LeSS framework.","PeriodicalId":437860,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 11th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131039908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Madan Mohan Jha, Rosa Maria Ferrer Vilardell, J. Narayan
Agile software development approach aims at overcoming the limitations of plan-driven software development by allowing requirement changes during all phases of product development and providing agility to organization to respond to changing market needs. Software organizations have successfully implemented agile scrum in distributed software development. However, they also encountered many challenges while implementation which led to considerable amount of effort spend just to manage work. Difficulties were primarily in the areas of communication, culture, different time zones, different level of domain know how across scrum teams, and knowledge management. In this practice paper, we will share practices and systems implemented, challenges encountered along with their countermeasures, and lessons learnt in successfully scaling the Agile Scrum development to 16 globally distributed scrum teams with 100+ team members, successfully delivering 2000+ user stories which required execution of 3000+ product test cases and 1000+ system test cases for verification and validation in a single version of platform release Providing Agility and Quality to Platform Development by Reducing Time to Market.
{"title":"Scaling Agile Scrum Software Development: Providing Agility and Quality to Platform Development by Reducing Time to Market","authors":"Madan Mohan Jha, Rosa Maria Ferrer Vilardell, J. Narayan","doi":"10.1109/ICGSE.2016.24","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2016.24","url":null,"abstract":"Agile software development approach aims at overcoming the limitations of plan-driven software development by allowing requirement changes during all phases of product development and providing agility to organization to respond to changing market needs. Software organizations have successfully implemented agile scrum in distributed software development. However, they also encountered many challenges while implementation which led to considerable amount of effort spend just to manage work. Difficulties were primarily in the areas of communication, culture, different time zones, different level of domain know how across scrum teams, and knowledge management. In this practice paper, we will share practices and systems implemented, challenges encountered along with their countermeasures, and lessons learnt in successfully scaling the Agile Scrum development to 16 globally distributed scrum teams with 100+ team members, successfully delivering 2000+ user stories which required execution of 3000+ product test cases and 1000+ system test cases for verification and validation in a single version of platform release Providing Agility and Quality to Platform Development by Reducing Time to Market.","PeriodicalId":437860,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 11th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133514421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M. Kuhrmann, Philipp Diebold, Jürgen Münch, Paolo Tell
For decades, Software Process Improvement (SPI) programs have been implemented, inter alia, to improve quality and speed of software development. To set up, guide, and carry out SPI projects, and to measure SPI state, impact, and success, a multitude of different SPI approaches and considerable experience are available. SPI addresses many aspects ranging from individual developer skills to entire organizations. It comprises for instance the optimization of specific activities in the software lifecycle as well as the creation of organization awareness and project culture. In the course of conducting a systematic mapping study on the state-of-the-art in SPI from a general perspective, we observed Global Software Engineering (GSE) becoming a topic of interest in recent years. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a detailed investigation of those papers from the overall systematic mapping study that were classified as addressing SPI in the context of GSE. From the main study's result set, a set of 30 papers dealing with GSE was selected for an in-depth analysis using the systematic review instrument to study the contributions and to develop an initial picture of how GSE is considered from the perspective of SPI. Our findings show the analyzed papers delivering a substantial discussion of cultural models and how such models can be used to better address and align SPI programs with multi-national environments. Furthermore, experience is shared discussing how agile approaches can be implemented in companies working at the global scale. Finally, success factors and barriers are studied to help companies implementing SPI in a GSE context.
{"title":"How Does Software Process Improvement Address Global Software Engineering?","authors":"M. Kuhrmann, Philipp Diebold, Jürgen Münch, Paolo Tell","doi":"10.1109/ICGSE.2016.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2016.10","url":null,"abstract":"For decades, Software Process Improvement (SPI) programs have been implemented, inter alia, to improve quality and speed of software development. To set up, guide, and carry out SPI projects, and to measure SPI state, impact, and success, a multitude of different SPI approaches and considerable experience are available. SPI addresses many aspects ranging from individual developer skills to entire organizations. It comprises for instance the optimization of specific activities in the software lifecycle as well as the creation of organization awareness and project culture. In the course of conducting a systematic mapping study on the state-of-the-art in SPI from a general perspective, we observed Global Software Engineering (GSE) becoming a topic of interest in recent years. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a detailed investigation of those papers from the overall systematic mapping study that were classified as addressing SPI in the context of GSE. From the main study's result set, a set of 30 papers dealing with GSE was selected for an in-depth analysis using the systematic review instrument to study the contributions and to develop an initial picture of how GSE is considered from the perspective of SPI. Our findings show the analyzed papers delivering a substantial discussion of cultural models and how such models can be used to better address and align SPI programs with multi-national environments. Furthermore, experience is shared discussing how agile approaches can be implemented in companies working at the global scale. Finally, success factors and barriers are studied to help companies implementing SPI in a GSE context.","PeriodicalId":437860,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 11th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124275348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. Correal, Oscar González Rojas, Manuel Camargo, G. Pedraza-Garcia
This paper presents MONO, a tool to support interdisciplinary and geographically dispersed teams. MONO supports the definition, execution, and monitoring of collaborative processes to allow development engineers to interact with musicians, designers, and producers, to create digital contents such as video games or animated short films. MONO supports geographically distributed teams, involved in digital content software development projects, by means of dynamic and configurable executable processes, and coordination and monitoring tools. In this work, we describe our experience developing MONO and the results obtained in our initial validation.
{"title":"MONO: A Computer-Supported Cooperative Tool for Digital Content Software Projects","authors":"D. Correal, Oscar González Rojas, Manuel Camargo, G. Pedraza-Garcia","doi":"10.1109/ICGSE.2016.36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2016.36","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents MONO, a tool to support interdisciplinary and geographically dispersed teams. MONO supports the definition, execution, and monitoring of collaborative processes to allow development engineers to interact with musicians, designers, and producers, to create digital contents such as video games or animated short films. MONO supports geographically distributed teams, involved in digital content software development projects, by means of dynamic and configurable executable processes, and coordination and monitoring tools. In this work, we describe our experience developing MONO and the results obtained in our initial validation.","PeriodicalId":437860,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 11th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115907592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Agile software development approaches are becoming mainstream as organizations recognize that their delivery methodology has to be nimble and flexible to accommodate new technologies and evolving customer requirements. However, large organizations depend on a global software delivery model wherein software teams are geographically distributed, and such an environment seems unsuited for Agile to succeed. In such scenarios, it is a challenge to be able to bring together the organization's Agile methodology, development environment, and distributed teams together in a standardized way, to be able to implement and govern the distributed delivery process objectively. Here, we present our approach to govern the adoption, usage and progress thereof of a distributed Agile methodology, that ties together the team and tool aspects with it. This becomes a single window to quickly bootstrap distributed Agile delivery projects using specific methods, metrics and dashboards, collaboration and gamification approaches. We have implemented this approach as an interactive Agile Workbench to present the teams and stakeholders with context-rich actionable alerts as well as situational awareness and helps bridge the gaps between cross-functional distributed teams which is essential to successful delivery of agile projects.
{"title":"Agile Workbench: Tying People, Process, and Tools in Distributed Agile Delivery","authors":"V. Sharma, Vikrant S. Kaulgud","doi":"10.1109/ICGSE.2016.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2016.17","url":null,"abstract":"Agile software development approaches are becoming mainstream as organizations recognize that their delivery methodology has to be nimble and flexible to accommodate new technologies and evolving customer requirements. However, large organizations depend on a global software delivery model wherein software teams are geographically distributed, and such an environment seems unsuited for Agile to succeed. In such scenarios, it is a challenge to be able to bring together the organization's Agile methodology, development environment, and distributed teams together in a standardized way, to be able to implement and govern the distributed delivery process objectively. Here, we present our approach to govern the adoption, usage and progress thereof of a distributed Agile methodology, that ties together the team and tool aspects with it. This becomes a single window to quickly bootstrap distributed Agile delivery projects using specific methods, metrics and dashboards, collaboration and gamification approaches. We have implemented this approach as an interactive Agile Workbench to present the teams and stakeholders with context-rich actionable alerts as well as situational awareness and helps bridge the gaps between cross-functional distributed teams which is essential to successful delivery of agile projects.","PeriodicalId":437860,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 11th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133467128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alpana Dubey, K. Abhinav, Sakshi Taneja, G. Virdi, Anurag Dwarakanath, A. Kass, Mani Suma Kuriakose
The emergence of online labor markets has concentrated a lot of attention on the prospect of using crowdsourcing for software development, with a potential to reduce costs, improve time-to-market, and access high-quality skills on demand. However, crowdsourcing of software development is still not widely adopted. A key barrier to adoption is a lack of confidence that a task will be completed on time with the required quality standards. While good managers can develop good, intuitive estimates of task completion when assigning work to their team members, they might lack similar intuition for individuals drawn from an online crowd. The phrase, "Post and Hope" is thus sometimes used when talking about the crowdsourcing of software-development tasks. The objective of this paper is to show the value of replacing the traditional, intuitive assessment of a team's capability with a quantitative assessment of the crowd, derived through analysis of historical performance on similar tasks. This analysis will serve to transform "Post and Hope" to "Post and Expect." We demonstrate this by analyzing data about tasks performed on two popular crowdsourcing platforms: Topcoder and Upwork. Analysis of historical data from these platforms indicates that the platforms indeed demonstrate some level of predictability in task completion. We have identified certain factors that consistently contribute to task completion on both the platforms. Our findings suggest that a data-driven decision processes can play an important role in successful adoption of crowdsourcing practice for software development.
在线劳动力市场的出现将大量注意力集中在使用众包进行软件开发的前景上，这有可能降低成本，缩短上市时间，并根据需要获得高质量的技能。然而，软件开发的众包仍然没有被广泛采用。采用的一个关键障碍是缺乏对任务将按要求的质量标准按时完成的信心。虽然优秀的管理者在给团队成员分配工作时，可以对任务完成情况做出良好的、直观的估计，但对于从网络人群中抽取的个人，他们可能缺乏类似的直觉。因此，在谈论软件开发任务的众包时，有时会使用“Post and Hope”这个短语。本文的目的是展示用对人群的定量评估取代传统的、直观的团队能力评估的价值，这种评估是通过分析类似任务的历史表现得出的。这种分析有助于将“Post and Hope”转变为“Post and Expect”。我们通过分析在两个流行的众包平台:Topcoder和Upwork上执行的任务数据来证明这一点。对这些平台历史数据的分析表明，这些平台确实在任务完成方面表现出一定程度的可预测性。我们已经确定了在两个平台上始终有助于任务完成的某些因素。我们的研究结果表明，数据驱动的决策过程可以在成功采用软件开发的众包实践中发挥重要作用。
{"title":"Dynamics of Software Development Crowdsourcing","authors":"Alpana Dubey, K. Abhinav, Sakshi Taneja, G. Virdi, Anurag Dwarakanath, A. Kass, Mani Suma Kuriakose","doi":"10.1109/ICGSE.2016.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2016.13","url":null,"abstract":"The emergence of online labor markets has concentrated a lot of attention on the prospect of using crowdsourcing for software development, with a potential to reduce costs, improve time-to-market, and access high-quality skills on demand. However, crowdsourcing of software development is still not widely adopted. A key barrier to adoption is a lack of confidence that a task will be completed on time with the required quality standards. While good managers can develop good, intuitive estimates of task completion when assigning work to their team members, they might lack similar intuition for individuals drawn from an online crowd. The phrase, \"Post and Hope\" is thus sometimes used when talking about the crowdsourcing of software-development tasks. The objective of this paper is to show the value of replacing the traditional, intuitive assessment of a team's capability with a quantitative assessment of the crowd, derived through analysis of historical performance on similar tasks. This analysis will serve to transform \"Post and Hope\" to \"Post and Expect.\" We demonstrate this by analyzing data about tasks performed on two popular crowdsourcing platforms: Topcoder and Upwork. Analysis of historical data from these platforms indicates that the platforms indeed demonstrate some level of predictability in task completion. We have identified certain factors that consistently contribute to task completion on both the platforms. Our findings suggest that a data-driven decision processes can play an important role in successful adoption of crowdsourcing practice for software development.","PeriodicalId":437860,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 11th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)","volume":"68 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133250279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Professional software products and IT systems and services today are developed mostly by globally distributed teams, projects, and companies. Successfully orchestrating Global Software Engineering (GSE) has become the major success factor both for organizations and practitioners. Yet, more than a half of all distributed projects does not achieve the intended objectives and is canceled. This paper summarizes experiences from academia and industry in a way to facilitate knowledge and technology transfer. It is based on an evaluation of 10 years of research, and industry collaboration and experience reported at the IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICGSE) series. The outcomes of our analysis show GSE as a field highly attached to industry and, thus, a considerable share of ICGSE papers address the transfer of Software Engineering concepts and solutions to the global stage. We found collaboration and teams, processes and organization, sourcing and supplier management, and success factors to be the topics gaining the most interest of researchers and practitioners. Beyond the analysis of the past conferences, we also look at current trends in GSE to motivate further research and industrial collaboration.
{"title":"Global Software Engineering: Evolution and Trends","authors":"C. Ebert, M. Kuhrmann, R. Prikladnicki","doi":"10.1109/ICGSE.2016.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2016.19","url":null,"abstract":"Professional software products and IT systems and services today are developed mostly by globally distributed teams, projects, and companies. Successfully orchestrating Global Software Engineering (GSE) has become the major success factor both for organizations and practitioners. Yet, more than a half of all distributed projects does not achieve the intended objectives and is canceled. This paper summarizes experiences from academia and industry in a way to facilitate knowledge and technology transfer. It is based on an evaluation of 10 years of research, and industry collaboration and experience reported at the IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICGSE) series. The outcomes of our analysis show GSE as a field highly attached to industry and, thus, a considerable share of ICGSE papers address the transfer of Software Engineering concepts and solutions to the global stage. We found collaboration and teams, processes and organization, sourcing and supplier management, and success factors to be the topics gaining the most interest of researchers and practitioners. Beyond the analysis of the past conferences, we also look at current trends in GSE to motivate further research and industrial collaboration.","PeriodicalId":437860,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 11th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122015937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper describes a case study of agile testing adoption in a legacy software product development referred here as Global Configurator Product (GCP). The stakeholders are distributed across locations in Germany, India and the U. S. Product development was practicing waterfall development model while adopting scrum. This paper shows challenges encountered by the testing team. The testing team evolved practices in the areas of new role mapping for test managers and testers, new responsibilities for test manager and tester, strengthening technical and soft skills of the testing team and adopting agile testing strategies. These practices contributed towards maximizing testing effectiveness and the product successes. This paper also demonstrates agile test pyramid and test-quadrant mapping with our testing and measures testing effectiveness with the help of testing metrics. The paper targets scrum masters, test managers and testers in agile software development.
{"title":"Challenges in Adapting Agile Testing in a Legacy Product","authors":"R. Gupta, Prabhulinga Manikreddy, V. AbhinandanG.","doi":"10.1109/ICGSE.2016.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2016.21","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes a case study of agile testing adoption in a legacy software product development referred here as Global Configurator Product (GCP). The stakeholders are distributed across locations in Germany, India and the U. S. Product development was practicing waterfall development model while adopting scrum. This paper shows challenges encountered by the testing team. The testing team evolved practices in the areas of new role mapping for test managers and testers, new responsibilities for test manager and tester, strengthening technical and soft skills of the testing team and adopting agile testing strategies. These practices contributed towards maximizing testing effectiveness and the product successes. This paper also demonstrates agile test pyramid and test-quadrant mapping with our testing and measures testing effectiveness with the help of testing metrics. The paper targets scrum masters, test managers and testers in agile software development.","PeriodicalId":437860,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 11th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125530465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alpana Dubey, G. Virdi, Mani Suma Kuriakose, Veenu Arora
This paper proposes an approach for adopting alternative workforce in an organization. Alternative workforce refers to a pool of workers who work for the organization as contract workers or as crowd workers for a set of specific tasks or duration. Adoption of crowd workers as an alternative workforce is gaining a lot of attention these days. However, it is still not widely adopted by big organizations because of the concerns related to quality, timeliness, and confidentiality. A partial adoption of crowd workforce is a natural next step to leverage the benefits of crowdsourcing. The above partial adoption creates a hybrid workforce structure where different type of workers, such as full time employees, contractors, and crowd workers, work for the organization. A number of challenges need to be addressed for the above model to succeed. For instance, hiring right workers, establishing a proper collaboration among the workers distributed across geographies, and assessing the workers for confidentiality and privacy. This paper proposes a platform that alleviates some of the above challenges. We present a pilot performed on the platform and initial experiences gained from the adoption of the platform.
{"title":"Towards Adopting Alternative Workforce for Software Engineering","authors":"Alpana Dubey, G. Virdi, Mani Suma Kuriakose, Veenu Arora","doi":"10.1109/ICGSE.2016.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2016.16","url":null,"abstract":"This paper proposes an approach for adopting alternative workforce in an organization. Alternative workforce refers to a pool of workers who work for the organization as contract workers or as crowd workers for a set of specific tasks or duration. Adoption of crowd workers as an alternative workforce is gaining a lot of attention these days. However, it is still not widely adopted by big organizations because of the concerns related to quality, timeliness, and confidentiality. A partial adoption of crowd workforce is a natural next step to leverage the benefits of crowdsourcing. The above partial adoption creates a hybrid workforce structure where different type of workers, such as full time employees, contractors, and crowd workers, work for the organization. A number of challenges need to be addressed for the above model to succeed. For instance, hiring right workers, establishing a proper collaboration among the workers distributed across geographies, and assessing the workers for confidentiality and privacy. This paper proposes a platform that alleviates some of the above challenges. We present a pilot performed on the platform and initial experiences gained from the adoption of the platform.","PeriodicalId":437860,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 11th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)","volume":"83 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130439663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Software developers and testers have to work together to achieve the goals of software development projects. In globally distributed software projects the development and testing are often scattered across multiple locations forming virtual teams. Further, the distributed projects are so complex that none of team members can possibly possess all the knowledge about the project individually. During testing in such teams, developers and testers need to coordinate and communicate frequently. However, coordination is affected by the availability of the project information, which is distributed among different project members and organizational structures. Many companies are facing decisions about how to apply agile methods in their distributed projects. These companies are often motivated by the opportunities of solving the coordination and communication difficulties associated with global software development. In this paper we investigate the communication between testers and developers in two teams from two software companies performing continuous agile testing in a distributed setting. We describe four communication practices used by the team: handover through issue tracker system, formal meetings, written communication and coordination by mutual adjustment. We also discuss communication between testers and developers in collocated versus distributed testers and developers. We have found that early participation of the testers is very important to the success of the handover between testers and developers. The communication between developers and testers is not sufficiently effective through written communication and that it changes depending on the type of the tasks and experience of the testers.
{"title":"Communication between Developers and Testers in Distributed Continuous Agile Testing","authors":"D. Cruzes, N. B. Moe, T. Dybå","doi":"10.1109/ICGSE.2016.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2016.27","url":null,"abstract":"Software developers and testers have to work together to achieve the goals of software development projects. In globally distributed software projects the development and testing are often scattered across multiple locations forming virtual teams. Further, the distributed projects are so complex that none of team members can possibly possess all the knowledge about the project individually. During testing in such teams, developers and testers need to coordinate and communicate frequently. However, coordination is affected by the availability of the project information, which is distributed among different project members and organizational structures. Many companies are facing decisions about how to apply agile methods in their distributed projects. These companies are often motivated by the opportunities of solving the coordination and communication difficulties associated with global software development. In this paper we investigate the communication between testers and developers in two teams from two software companies performing continuous agile testing in a distributed setting. We describe four communication practices used by the team: handover through issue tracker system, formal meetings, written communication and coordination by mutual adjustment. We also discuss communication between testers and developers in collocated versus distributed testers and developers. We have found that early participation of the testers is very important to the success of the handover between testers and developers. The communication between developers and testers is not sufficiently effective through written communication and that it changes depending on the type of the tasks and experience of the testers.","PeriodicalId":437860,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 11th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)","volume":"191 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131897113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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