Casper Lassenius

Cristobal J. Garcia, Peter A. Gloor, Julia Gluesing et al.

Where science, design, business and art meet, COINs13 looks at the emerging forces behind the phenomena of open-source, creative, entrepreneurial and social movements. COINs13 combines a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as social network analysis, group dynamics, design and visualization, information systems, collective action and the psychology and sociality of collaboration. The COINs13 conference theme is Learning from the Swarm. The papers in this volume explore what is relevant with regard to the innovative powers of creative and civic swarms, what are the observable qualities of virtual collaboration and mobilization, and how does the quest for global cooperation affect local networks.

Jefferson Seide Molléri, Casper Lassenius, Magne Jørgensen

Context: Backsourcing is the process of insourcing previously outsourced activities. When companies experience environmental or strategic changes, or challenges with outsourcing, backsourcing can be a viable alternative. While outsourcing and related processes have been extensively studied in software engineering, few studies report experiences with backsourcing. Objectives: We intend to summarize the results of the research literature on the backsourcing of IT, with a focus on software development. By identifying practical relevance experience, we aim to present findings that may help companies considering backsourcing. In addition, we aim to identify gaps in the current research literature and point out areas for future work. Method: Our systematic literature review (SLR) started with a search for empirical studies on the backsourcing of software development. From each study we identified the contexts in which backsourcing occurs, the factors leading to the decision to backsource, the backsourcing process itself, and the outcomes of backsourcing. We employed inductive coding to extract textual data from the papers identified and qualitative cross-case analysis to synthesize the evidence from backsourcing experiences. Results: We identified 17 papers that reported 26 cases of backsourcing, six of which were related to software development. The cases came from a variety of contexts. The most common reasons for backsourcing were improving quality, reducing costs, and regaining control of outsourced activities. The backsourcing process can be described as containing five sub-processes: change management, vendor relationship management, competence building, organizational build-up, and transfer of ownership. Furthermore, ...

Oemer Uludag, Pascal Philipp, Abheeshta Putta et al.

Context: Success with agile methods in the small scale has led to an increasing adoption also in large development undertakings and organizations. Recent years have also seen an increasing amount of primary research on the topic, as well as a number of systematic literature reviews. However, there is no systematic overview of the whole research field. Objective: This work identifies, classifies, and evaluates the state of the art of research in large-scale agile development. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study and rigorously selected 136 studies. We designed a classification framework and extracted key information from the studies. We synthesized the obtained data and created an overview of the state of the art. Results: This work contributes with (i) a description of large-scale agile endeavors reported in the industry, (ii) a systematic map of existing research in the field, (iii) an overview of influential studies, (iv) an overview of the central research themes, and (v) a research agenda for future research. Conclusion: This study portrays the state of the art in large-scale agile development and offers researchers and practitioners a reflection of the past thirteen years of research and practice on the large-scale application of agile methods.

Stefan Wagner, Daniel Méndez Fernández, Michael Felderer et al.

Requirements Engineering (RE) has established itself as a software engineering discipline during the past decades. While researchers have been investigating the RE discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, attempts to systematically derive an empirically-based theory in context of the RE discipline have just recently been started. However, such a theory is needed if we are to define and motivate guidance in performing high quality RE research and practice. We aim at providing an empirical and valid foundation for a theory of RE, which helps software engineers establish effective and efficient RE processes. We designed a survey instrument and theory that has now been replicated in 10 countries world-wide. We evaluate the propositions of the theory with bootstrapped confidence intervals and derive potential explanations for the propositions. We report on the underlying theory and the full results obtained from the replication studies with participants from 228 organisations. Our results represent a substantial step forward towards developing an empirically-based theory of RE giving insights into current practices with RE processes. The results reveal, for example, that there are no strong differences between organisations in different countries and regions, that interviews, facilitated meetings and prototyping are the most used elicitation techniques, that requirements are often documented textually, that traces between requirements and code or design documents is common, requirements specifications themselves are rarely changed and that requirements engineering (process) improvement endeavours are mostly intrinsically motivated. Our study establishes a theory that can be used as starting point for many further studies for more detailed investigations. Practitioners can use the results as theory-supported guidance on selecting suitable RE methods and techniques.

Petteri Raety, Benjamin Behm, Kim-Karol Dikert et al.

While global software development (GSD) projects face cultural and time differences, the biggest challenge is communication. We studied a distributed student project with an industrial customer. The project lasted 3 months, involved 25 participants, and was distributed between the University of Victoria, Canada and Aalto University, Finland. We analyzed email communication, version control system (VCS) data, and surveys on satisfaction. Our aim was to find out whether reflecting on communication affected it, if standups influenced when developers committed to the VCS repository, and if leaders emerged in the three distributed Scrum teams. Initially students sent on average 21 emails per day. With the reduction to 16 emails, satisfaction with communication increased. By comparing Scrum standup times and VCS activity we found that the live communication of standups activated people to work on the project. Out of the three teams, one had an emergent communication facilitator.