research-article

An Empirical Investigation of Spikes in Agile Software Development

Authors:

Hussein Al Hashimi,

Abdullah Altaleb,

Andrew GravellAuthors Info & Claims

ESSE '20: Proceedings of the 2020 European Symposium on Software Engineering

Pages 37 - 43

https://doi.org/10.1145/3393822.3432342

Published: 21 December 2020 Publication History

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Abstract

The use of spikes in agile software development (ASD) can enable organizations to produce quality software by employing the required technical expertise, planning the entire development cycle and ensuring that the client's requirements are adhered to. This study aims to examine the use of spikes in ASD. It explores the role, efficiency and efficacy of spikes in various software development domains through the different agile methods. An exploratory research design is adopted to achieve this purpose, whereby mixed methods are used to collect concurrently both qualitative and quantitative data from the experts recruited to the study. Based on the study's findings, this paper shows spikes' impact on risk reduction and their role in the estimation process, as well as how their use is related to the team's understanding and the consistency and reliability of the story estimate. Through interviews, it establishes that the primary role of spikes is risk management through investigations to understand user stories and reveal any uncertainty. Both the efficiency and efficacy of spikes were found to be high. The findings further showed that spikes improve the quality of the end product.

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Ravikumar NKuhaneswaran BSaleem AWijeratne AKumara BHerath G(2022)Classification of Product Backlog Items in Agile Software Development Using Machine LearningHandbook of Research on Technological Advances of Library and Information Science in Industry 5.010.4018/978-1-6684-4755-0.ch016(306-329)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-4755-0.ch016
Hashimi HAbduldaem AGravell A(2022)Common Spikes Success Factors: An Industrial Investigation within Agile Software Development2022 12th International Conference on Software Technology and Engineering (ICSTE)10.1109/ICSTE57415.2022.00008(1-7)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSTE57415.2022.00008

Index Terms

An Empirical Investigation of Spikes in Agile Software Development
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development process management
      1. Risk management
      2. Software development methods
        Agile software development

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ESSE '20: Proceedings of the 2020 European Symposium on Software Engineering

November 2020

220 pages

ISBN:9781450377621

DOI:10.1145/3393822

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]

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Published: 21 December 2020

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ESSE 2020: 2020 European Symposium on Software Engineering

November 6 - 8, 2020

Rome, Italy

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Ravikumar NKuhaneswaran BSaleem AWijeratne AKumara BHerath G(2022)Classification of Product Backlog Items in Agile Software Development Using Machine LearningHandbook of Research on Technological Advances of Library and Information Science in Industry 5.010.4018/978-1-6684-4755-0.ch016(306-329)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-4755-0.ch016
Hashimi HAbduldaem AGravell A(2022)Common Spikes Success Factors: An Industrial Investigation within Agile Software Development2022 12th International Conference on Software Technology and Engineering (ICSTE)10.1109/ICSTE57415.2022.00008(1-7)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSTE57415.2022.00008

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Recommendations

Agile Global Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

The Combination of Agile and Lean in Software Development: An Experience Report Analysis

Stakeholder Involvement in Agile Software Development

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