(Press-News.org) Around the globe, software-intensive organisations shift from plan-based development processes to Agile ones, intending to focus more on team interaction, better products, customers' needs, and readiness to change.
But how do these organisations succeed with large-scale Agile software transformations - and how do the success factors relate? This has been discussed in the scientific community for several years. Now, Associate Professor Daniel Russo from Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University presents a long-term study, which sheds even more light on the widespread phenomenon.
The study is accepted by the world-renowned journal ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and has already generated attention from practitioners globally.
Not a shopping list
By combining a field study of a large-scale Agile transformation process at a notable Italian mission-critical organisation with a survey of 190 screened software engineers, Daniel Russo has developed an Agile Success Model. In the model, the roles of the stakeholders are clarified, and according to the author, the hope is that practitioners planning an Agile transformation can use the model to gain a deeper understanding of such a process.
- It is essential to say that this is not a shopping list or a recipe on how to be a success. Instead, I see this as a tool for organisations, teams and managers, providing them with an overview of which factors they should primarily focus on when planning or running an Agile transformation, Daniel Russo says.
He highlights the fact that the study is a combination of both qualitative and quantitative analysis. After generating hypothesis in the field, these have been validated through a large scale of professionals who actually use Scrum.
No difference between social and technical skills
So, what are the most critical constructs to project success? According to Daniel Russo, management should prioritise strengthening developers' skills:
- The failure or success of a software project highly relies on both the social and technical skills of the development team. There is no semantic difference between these set of skills. Being great at coding is not enough if you lack communication skills - and likewise, the other way around. This is a crucial consideration for hiring and setting up training programs.
At the same time, the roles of the middle management are of relatively smaller importance. Teams in Agile frameworks experience a relatively high degree of freedom to self-organise, and communication and collaboration are two pivotal activities in the groups.
Top management losses control
But the study also shows that providing an adequate organisational setting is even more critical for project success than just hiring socio-technically skilled developers:
- Project success mainly depends on the top management commitment. The top management has to welcome the fact that they will lose some degree of control over the development after the transformation, Daniel Russo says.
He points out that even though the field study was carried out among professionals who develop mission-critical software, the analysis shows that the model is non-domain specific and can be used in mission-critical and non-critical settings.
Meeting with Scrum.org
The results from Aalborg University supports the new direction of the Scrum Guide 2020, putting much more emphasis on the development side and downsizing middle management.
- The update of the guide was not performed following a scholarly investigation. In this perspective, our study is also a primary contribution to the practitioner's community by backing up the experience-based update of the most used Agile framework, Daniel Russo says.
INFORMATION:
Rising unemployment, inadequate benefits and low paid work are the main causes of poverty and destitution in Stoke-on-Trent according to the findings of a new study.
The research carried out by Staffordshire University and Citizens Advice Staffordshire North & Stoke-on-Trent, and funded through Research England's Strategic Priorities Fund, aims to understand the impact COVID-19 is having on residents in the city.
The report includes case studies of people who have turned to Citizens Advice and Alice Charity's Foodbank after finding themselves unable to work through the pandemic and facing increasing debt or struggling to claim benefits.
Post ...
Lanthanides are rare-earth heavy metals with useful magnetic properties and a knack for emitting light. Researchers had long assumed that lanthanides' toxicity risk was low and therefore safe to implement in a number of high-tech breakthroughs we now take for granted: from OLEDs (organic light-emitting displays)¬¬ to medical MRIs and even hybrid vehicles.
In recent years, however, some scientists have questioned lanthanides' safety. In matters concerning health care, for example, some MRI patients have attributed a litany of side effects, including ...
Most fish rely on water to feed, using suction to capture their prey. A new study, however, shows that snowflake morays can grab and swallow prey on land without water thanks to an extra set of jaws in their throats.
After a moray eel captures prey with its first set of jaws, a second set of "pharyngeal jaws" then reaches out to grasp the struggling prey and pull it down into the moray's throat. Rita Mehta, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, first described this astonishing feeding mechanism in a 2007 Nature paper.
The new study, published June 7 in the Journal of Experimental Biology, shows that these pharyngeal jaws enable ...
Forty years ago, the first cases of HIV/AIDS in the U.S began to raise public awareness- but new research highlights the struggle people living with the disease still face against stigma, discrimination and negative labelling in their own families, communities and even amongst healthcare professionals.
A new study by Flinders University researchers interviewed 20 HIV healthcare providers including doctors, nurses, and counsellors in Yogyakarta and Belu districts, Indonesia to examine their experiences when treating patients with HIV. Their responses indicated admission of ...
A trial using mice has shown that a diet high in sugar from childhood could lead to significant weight gain, persistent hyperactivity and learning impairments
Many people on 'western' diets consume four times more the sugar recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO)
Reducing sucrose intake in mice by four-fold prevented sugar-induced increase in weight gain, supporting the WHO's recommendations of 25g per person a day.
Children who consume too much sugar could be at greater risk of becoming obese, hyperactive, and cognitively impaired, as adults, according to the results of a new study of mice led by ...
Propylene oxide (PO) is one of the important propylene derivatives with high reactivity, which is used extensively as raw material for the manufacture of numerous commercial chemicals. The titanosilicate-catalyzed hydrogen peroxide propylene oxide process (HPPO) is considered to be most advantageous because it is highly economical and ecofriendly, giving only H2O as the theoretical byproduct and achieving high PO selectivity under mild reaction conditions. The industrial HPPO process is generally carried out in a fixed-bed reactor using the shaped titanosilicate catalysts. Unfortunately, the inert and non-porous binders in shaping ...
The geometric isolation of metal species in single-atom catalysis (SACs) not only maximizes the atomic utilization efficiency, but also endows SACs with unique selectivity in various transformations.
The coordination environment of isolated metal atoms in SACs determines the catalytic performance. However, it remains challenging to modulate the coordinative structure while still maintain the single-atom dispersion.
Recently, a research group led by Prof. ZHANG Tao and Prof. WANG Aiqin from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences fabricated Ru1/NC ...
CHICAGO --- Having trouble falling or staying asleep may leave you feeling tired and frustrated. It also could subtract years from your life expectancy, according to a new study from Northwestern Medicine and the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom (UK).
The effect was even greater for people with diabetes who experienced sleep disturbances, the study found. Study participants with diabetes who experienced frequent sleep disturbances were 87% more likely to die of any cause (car accident, heart attack, etc.) during the 8.9-year study follow-up period compared to people without diabetes or sleep disturbances. They were 12% more likely to die over this period than those who had diabetes but not frequent sleep disturbances.
"If you don't have diabetes, your sleep ...
In a paper published by the Journal of Sleep Research, researchers reveal how they examined data* from half a million middle-aged UK participants asked if they had trouble falling asleep at night or woke up in the middle of the night.
The report found that people with frequent sleep problems are at a higher risk of dying than those without sleep problems. This grave outcome was more pronounced for people with Type-2 diabetes: during the nine years of the research, the study found that they were 87 per cent more likely to die of any cause than people without diabetes ...
Durham, NC - Critically ill COVID-19 patients treated with non-altered stem cells from umbilical cord connective tissue were more than twice as likely to survive as those who did not have the treatment, according to a study published today in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine.
The clinical trial, carried out at four hospitals in Jakarta, Indonesia, also showed that administering the treatment to COVID-19 patients with an added chronic health condition such as diabetes, hypertension or kidney disease increased their survival more than fourfold.
All 40 patients who took part in the double-blind, controlled, ...
