research-article

An Insight into the Capabilities of Professionals and Teams in Agile Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

Authors:

Sai Datta Vishnubhotla,

Lars LundbergAuthors Info & Claims

ICSCA '18: Proceedings of the 2018 7th International Conference on Software and Computer Applications

Pages 10 - 19

https://doi.org/10.1145/3185089.3185096

Published: 08 February 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Background: Previous studies investigated key characteristics of software engineers and factors influencing the performance of individuals, productivity of teams and project success within agile software development (ASD). They aided in the active investigation of human aspects in ASD. However, capability measurement and prediction with respect to agile workforce, owing to its importance, is an area that needs spotlight.

Objective: The objective of this paper is to present the state of the art relating to capability measurement of software engineers and teams working in ASD projects.

Method: We carried out a systematic literature review (SLR) focused on identifying attributes used for measuring and predicting the capabilities of individual software engineers and teams.

Results: Evidence from 16 studies showed attributes that can measure capabilities of engineers and teams, and also attributes that can be used as capability predictors. Further, different instruments used to measure those attributes were presented.

Conclusions: The SLR presented a wide list of attributes that were grouped into various categories. This information can be used by project managers as, for example, a checklist to consider when allocating software engineers to teams and in turn teams to a project. Further, this study indicated the necessity for an investigation into capability prediction models.

References

[1]

VersionOne, "The 11th annual state of agile report," 2017. {Online}. Available: https://explore.versionone.com/state- of-agile/versionone-11th-annual-state-of-agile-report-2.

[2]

P. Rodríguez, J. Markkula, M. Oivo, and K. Turula, "Survey on agile and lean usage in finnish software industry," ESEM '12, pp. 139--148, 2012.

Digital Library

[3]

S. W. Ambler, "Has agile peaked?" DR DOBBS JOURNAL, vol. 33, no. 6, pp. 52--54, 2008.

[4]

A. Trendowicz and J. Münch, "Factors influencing software development productivity---state-of-the-art and industrial experiences," Advances in computers, vol. 77, pp. 185--241, 2009.

[5]

P. G. Armour, "The spiritual life of projects," Communications of the ACM, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 11--14, 2002.

Digital Library

[6]

B. Boehm and R. Turner, "People factors in software management: Lessons from comparing agile and plan-driven methods," Crosstalk-The Journal of Defense Software Engineering,(Dec 2003), 2003.

[7]

M. F. Van Assen, "Agile-based competence management: The relation between agile manufacturing and time-based competence management," International Journal of Agile Management Systems, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 142--155, 2000.

[8]

P. Abrahamsson, O. Salo, J. Ronkainen, J. Warsta, et al., "Agile software development methods: Review and analysis," 2002.

[9]

K. Beck, M. Beedle, A. Van Bennekum, A. Cockburn, W. Cunningham, M. Fowler, J. Grenning, J. Highsmith, A. Hunt, R. Jeffries, et al., The agile manifesto, 2001.

[10]

S. T. Acuna, N. Juristo, and A. M. Moreno, "Emphasizing human capabilities in software development," IEEE software, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 94--101, 2006.

Digital Library

[11]

D. Strnad and N. Guid, "A fuzzy-genetic decision support system for project team formation," Applied soft computing, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 1178--1187, 2010.

Digital Library

[12]

T. Kollmann, M. HäSel, and N. Breugst, "Competence of it professionals in e-business venture teams: The effect of experience and expertise on preference structure," Journal of management information systems, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 51-- 80, 2009.

Digital Library

[13]

S. T. Bell, "Deep-level composition variables as predictors of team performance: A meta-analysis.," Journal of applied psychology, vol. 92, no. 3, p. 595, 2007.

[14]

D. Truong and T. Jitbaipoon, "How can agile methodologies be used to enhance the success of information technology projects?" International Journal of Information Technology Project Management (IJITPM), vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 1--16, 2016.

Digital Library

[15]

T. Tan, Q. Li, B. Boehm, Y. Yang, M. He, and R. Moazeni, "Productivity trends in incremental and iterative software development," in Proceedings of the 2009 3rd International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, IEEE Computer Society, 2009, pp. 1--10.

Digital Library

[16]

X. Zhang, V. Venkatesh, and S. A. Brown, "Designing collaborative systems to enhance team performance," Journal of the Association for Information Systems, vol. 12, no. 8, p. 556, 2011.

[17]

P. Kettunen, "The many facets of high-performing software teams: A capability-based analysis approach," in European Conference on Software Process Improvement, Springer, 2013, pp. 131--142.

[18]

E. Union, "Recommendation of the european parliament and of the council of 23 april 2008 on the establishment of the european qualifications framework for lifelong learning," Official Journal of the European Union, vol. 20, 2008.

[19]

K. Siau, X. Tan, and H. Sheng, "Important characteristics of software development team members: An empirical investigation using repertory grid," J. Inf. Syst., vol. 20, pp. 563-- 580, 2010.

[20]

D. Takpuie and M. Tanner, "Investigating the characteristics needed by scrum team members to successfully transfer tacit knowledge during agile software projects," Electronic Journal of Information Systems Evaluation, vol. 19, no. 1, 2016.

[21]

A. Medina and A. J. Francis, "What are the characteristics that software development project team members associate with a good project manager?" Project Management Journal, vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 81--93, 2015.

[22]

Y. Wang and N. Haggerty, "Individual virtual competence and its influence on work outcomes," Journal of Management Information Systems, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 299--334, 2011.

Digital Library

[23]

S. T. Acuña and N. Juristo, "Assigning people to roles in software projects," Software: Practice&Experience, vol. 34, pp. 675--696, 2004.

Digital Library

[24]

O. Creighton and M. Singer, "Who leads our future leaders?: On the rising relevance of social competence in software development," in Proceedings of the first international workshop on Leadership and management in software architecture, ACM, 2008, pp. 23--26.

Digital Library

[25]

G. Purna Sudhakar, A. Farooq, and S. Patnaik, "Soft factors affecting the performance of software development teams," Team Performance Management: An International Journal, vol. 17, pp. 187--205, 2011.

[26]

T. Kanij, R. Merkel, and J. Grundy, "An empirical investigation of personality traits of software testers," in Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), 2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on, IEEE, 2015, pp. 1--7.

Digital Library

[27]

T. J. Gandomani, H. Zulzalil, A. A. Ghani, A. B. M. Sultan, and K. Y. Sharif, "How human aspects impress agile software development transition and adoption," International Journal of Software Engineering and Its Applications, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 129--148, 2014.

[28]

A. Chagas, M. Santos, C. Santana, and A. Vasconcelos, "The impact of human factors on agile projects," in Agile Conference (AGILE), 2015, IEEE, 2015, pp. 87--91.

Digital Library

[29]

S. Licorish, A. Philpott, and S. G. MacDonell, "Supporting agile team composition: A prototype tool for identifying personality (in) compatibilities," in Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects on Software Engineering, 2009, pp. 66-- 73.

Digital Library

[30]

H. Robinson and H. Sharp, "The characteristics of xp teams," in International Conference on Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering, Springer, 2004, pp. 139--147.

[31]

A. C. Dutra, R. Prikladnicki, and T. Conte, "Characteristics of high performance software development teams," in International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Springer, 2015, pp. 345--363.

[32]

P. Lenberg, R. Feldt, and L. G. Wallgren, "Behavioral software engineering: A definition and systematic literature review," Journal of Systems and Software, vol. 107, pp. 15--37, 2015.

Digital Library

[33]

K. Sutling, Z. Mansor, S. Widyarto, S. Lecthmunan, and N. H. Arshad, "Understanding of project manager competency in agile software development project: The taxonomy," in Information Science and Applications, Springer, 2015, pp. 859-- 868.

[34]

K. Barbara and S. Charters, "Guidelines for performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering," EBSE Technical Report EBSE-2007-01.2007, 2007.

[35]

B. Kitchenham and P. Brereton, "A systematic review of systematic review process research in software engineering," Information and software technology, vol. 55, no. 12, pp. 2049-- 2075, 2013.

Digital Library

[36]

A. Rehman Gilal, M. Omar, and K. I. Sharif, "A rule-based approach for discovering effective software team composition." Journal of Information & Communication Technology, vol. 13, 2014.

[37]

F. Q. da Silva, A. C. C. Franca, T. B. Gouveia, C. V. Monteiro, E. S. Cardozo, and M. Suassuna, "An empirical study on the use of team building criteria in software projects," in Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 2011 International Symposium on, IEEE, 2011, pp. 58--67.

Digital Library

[38]

E. Norman, S. Pfleeger, et al., "Software metrics: A rigorous and practical approach," PWS Publishing Company, 1997.

Digital Library

[39]

A. B. M. Moniruzzaman and S. A. Hossain, "Comparative study on agile software development methodologies," CoRR, vol. abs/1307.3356, 2013.

[40]

J. R. Landis and G. G. Koch, "The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data," biometrics, pp. 159--174, 1977.

[41]

C. Wohlin, "Guidelines for snowballing in systematic literature studies and a replication in software engineering," in Proceedings of the 18th international conference on evaluation and assessment in software engineering, ACM, 2014, p. 38.

Digital Library

Cited By

Vishnubhotla SMendes E(2024)Examining the effect of software professionals’ personality & additional capabilities on agile teams’ climateJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112054214:COnline publication date: 1-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112054
Vishnubhotla SMendes E(2024)Exploring the relation between personality traits and agile team climateJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111937210:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111937
Cunha FPerkusich MGuimaraes ESantos RRique TAlbuquerque DPerkusich AAlmeida HGorgônio K(2023)Exploring the Capabilities of Professionals and Agile Teams: An Updated Review2023 International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM)10.23919/SoftCOM58365.2023.10271598(1-6)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.23919/SoftCOM58365.2023.10271598
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

An Insight into the Capabilities of Professionals and Teams in Agile Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development process management
      1. Software development methods
        Agile software development

Recommendations

Agile Global Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review
SBES '20: Proceedings of the XXXIV Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering

Global Software Development (GSD) continues to grow substantially and it is fast becoming the norm and fundamentally different from local Software Engineering development. Withal, agile software development (ASD) has become an appealing choice for ...
Understanding the perceived relevance of capability measures: A survey of Agile Software Development practitioners
Abstract Context:
In the light of the swift and iterative nature of Agile Software Development (ASD) practices, establishing deeper insights into capability measurement within the context of team formation is crucial, as the ...
Highlights
- To investigate the degree to which capability measures apply to practice.
- To ...
Software Process Improvement in Agile Software Development A Systematic Literature Review
SEAA '15: Proceedings of the 2015 41st Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications

It is recognized the relevance and importance that software process improvement (SPI) and agile development have gained in the field of software engineering. Both are approaches that increase the efficiency and effectiveness of a software development ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

ICSCA '18: Proceedings of the 2018 7th International Conference on Software and Computer Applications

February 2018

349 pages

ISBN:9781450354141

DOI:10.1145/3185089

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

University of Tokyo

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 February 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Conference

ICSCA 2018

ICSCA 2018: 2018 7th International Conference on Software and Computer Applications

February 8 - 10, 2018

Kuantan, Malaysia

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

14
Total Citations
View Citations
611
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)95
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6

Reflects downloads up to 06 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Vishnubhotla SMendes E(2024)Examining the effect of software professionals’ personality & additional capabilities on agile teams’ climateJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112054214:COnline publication date: 1-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112054
Vishnubhotla SMendes E(2024)Exploring the relation between personality traits and agile team climateJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111937210:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111937
Cunha FPerkusich MGuimaraes ESantos RRique TAlbuquerque DPerkusich AAlmeida HGorgônio K(2023)Exploring the Capabilities of Professionals and Agile Teams: An Updated Review2023 International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM)10.23919/SoftCOM58365.2023.10271598(1-6)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.23919/SoftCOM58365.2023.10271598
Zolduoarrati ELicorish SStanger N(2023)Secondary studies on human aspects in software engineeringJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111654200:COnline publication date: 1-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111654
Assyne N(2022)Towards a Security Competence of Software DevelopersResearch Anthology on Agile Software, Software Development, and Testing10.4018/978-1-6684-3702-5.ch098(2050-2064)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-3702-5.ch098
Assyne NGhanbari HPulkkinen M(2022)The state of research on software engineering competenciesJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2021.111183185:COnline publication date: 1-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2021.111183
Alshammari F(2022)Cost estimate in scrum project with the decision-based effort estimation techniqueSoft Computing - A Fusion of Foundations, Methodologies and Applications10.1007/s00500-022-07352-w26:20(10993-11005)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00500-022-07352-w
Aziz Butt SPiñeres-Espitia GAriza-Colpas PTariq M(2022)Project Management Issues While Using Agile MethodologyLean and Agile Software Development10.1007/978-3-030-94238-0_12(201-214)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94238-0_12
Dutra EDiirr BSantos G(2021)Human Factors and their Influence on Software Development Teams - A Tertiary StudyProceedings of the XXXV Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3474624.3474625(442-451)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3474624.3474625
Vishnubhotla SMendes ELundberg L(2021)Understanding the perceived relevance of capability measuresJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2021.111013180:COnline publication date: 1-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2021.111013
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents