TY - GEN

T1 - Helping teams to help themselves

T2 - 7th International Working Conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering, HCSE 2018

AU - Klünder, Jil

AU - Kortum, Fabian

AU - Ziehm, Thorsten

AU - Schneider, Kurt

PY - 2019/1/1

Y1 - 2019/1/1

N2 - Software process improvement is a very important topic. Almost all companies and organizations face the necessity for improvement sooner or later. Sometimes, there is obvious potential for improvement (e.g., if the number of developers does not fit the project size). Nonetheless, fixing all obvious issues does not necessarily lead to a “perfect” project. There are a lot of interdependencies between project parameters that are difficult to detect – sometimes due to the influences of social aspects which can be hardly grasped. We want to support the process of improving daily work by simulating and visualizing how project parameters evolve over time. Our approach is based on building a System Dynamics model that takes into account key performance indicators as well as assumptions about social aspects. In the present case, we chose parameters of capacity, customer satisfaction, and mood. The model uncovers interdependencies between the available parameters. Furthermore, it is able to simulate consequences of different preconditions and incidents during a sprint such as change requests. In this contribution, we present our approach and apply it in a case study with three agile teams in industry. We build a System Dynamics model and use it for sprint simulations. Our analysis determined, e.g., the teams’ productivity during the sprint and their workload each day. The simulation increased the teams’ awareness of the negative influences due to interventions during the sprint.

AB - Software process improvement is a very important topic. Almost all companies and organizations face the necessity for improvement sooner or later. Sometimes, there is obvious potential for improvement (e.g., if the number of developers does not fit the project size). Nonetheless, fixing all obvious issues does not necessarily lead to a “perfect” project. There are a lot of interdependencies between project parameters that are difficult to detect – sometimes due to the influences of social aspects which can be hardly grasped. We want to support the process of improving daily work by simulating and visualizing how project parameters evolve over time. Our approach is based on building a System Dynamics model that takes into account key performance indicators as well as assumptions about social aspects. In the present case, we chose parameters of capacity, customer satisfaction, and mood. The model uncovers interdependencies between the available parameters. Furthermore, it is able to simulate consequences of different preconditions and incidents during a sprint such as change requests. In this contribution, we present our approach and apply it in a case study with three agile teams in industry. We build a System Dynamics model and use it for sprint simulations. Our analysis determined, e.g., the teams’ productivity during the sprint and their workload each day. The simulation increased the teams’ awareness of the negative influences due to interventions during the sprint.

KW - Agile software development teams

KW - Process improvement

KW - Simulation

KW - Social aspects

KW - System dynamics

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85059964208&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-05909-5_3

DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-05909-5_3

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85059964208

SN - 978-3-030-05908-8

T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

SP - 31

EP - 50

BT - Human-Centered Software Engineering

A2 - Lárusdóttir, Marta Kristín

A2 - Winckler, Marco

A2 - Kuusinen, Kati

A2 - Palanque, Philippe

A2 - Bogdan, Cristian

Y2 - 3 September 2018 through 5 September 2018

ER -