Regina Hebig

Marco Kuhrmann, Paolo Tell, Regina Hebig et al.

Together with many success stories, promises such as the increase in production speed and the improvement in stakeholders' collaboration have contributed to making agile a transformation in the software industry in which many companies want to take part. However, driven either by a natural and expected evolution or by contextual factors that challenge the adoption of agile methods as prescribed by their creator(s), software processes in practice mutate into hybrids over time. Are these still agile? In this article, we investigate the question: what makes a software development method agile? We present an empirical study grounded in a large-scale international survey that aims to identify software development methods and practices that improve or tame agility. Based on 556 data points, we analyze the perceived degree of agility in the implementation of standard project disciplines and its relation to used development methods and practices. Our findings suggest that only a small number of participants operate their projects in a purely traditional or agile manner (under 15%). That said, most project disciplines and most practices show a clear trend towards increasing degrees of agility. Compared to the methods used to develop software, the selection of practices has a stronger effect on the degree of agility of a given discipline. Finally, there are no methods or practices that explicitly guarantee or prevent agility. We conclude that agility cannot be defined solely at the process level. Additional factors need to be taken into account when trying to implement or improve agility in a software company. Finally, we discuss the field of software process-related research in the light of our findings and present a roadmap for future research.

Hamdy Michael Ayas, Philipp Leitner, Regina Hebig

Background: Microservices migrations are challenging and expensive projects with many decisions that need to be made in a multitude of dimensions. Existing research tends to focus on technical issues and decisions (e.g., how to split services). Equally important organizational or business issues and their relations with technical aspects often remain out of scope or on a high level of abstraction. Aims: In this study, we aim to holistically chart the decision-making that happens on all dimensions of a migration project towards microservices (including, but not limited to, the technical dimension). Method: We investigate 16 different migration cases in a grounded theory interview study, with 19 participants that recently migrated towards microservices. This study strongly focuses on the human aspects of a migration, through stakeholders and their decisions. Results: We identify 3 decision-making processes consisting of 22decision-points and their alternative options. The decision-points are related to creating stakeholder engagement and assessing feasibility, technical implementation, and organizational restructuring. Conclusions: Our study provides an initial theory of decision-making in migrations to microservices. It also outfits practitioners with a roadmap of which decisions they should be prepared to make and at which point in the migration.

Jil Klünder, Regina Hebig, Paolo Tell et al.

Software development methods are usually not applied by the book. Companies are under pressure to continuously deploy software products that meet market needs and stakeholders' requests. To implement efficient and effective development processes, companies utilize multiple frameworks, methods and practices, and combine these into hybrid methods. A common combination contains a rich management framework to organize and steer projects complemented with a number of smaller practices providing the development teams with tools to complete their tasks. In this paper, based on 732 data points collected through an international survey, we study the software development process use in practice. Our results show that 76.8% of the companies implement hybrid methods. Company size as well as the strategy in devising and evolving hybrid methods affect the suitability of the chosen process to reach company or project goals. Our findings show that companies that combine planned improvement programs with process evolution can increase their process' suitability by up to 5%.

Jil Klünder, Dzejlana Karajic, Paolo Tell et al.

Selecting a suitable development method for a specific project context is one of the most challenging activities in process design. Every project is unique and, thus, many context factors have to be considered. Recent research took some initial steps towards statistically constructing hybrid development methods, yet, paid little attention to the peculiarities of context factors influencing method and practice selection. In this paper, we utilize exploratory factor analysis and logistic regression analysis to learn such context factors and to identify methods that are correlated with these factors. Our analysis is based on 829 data points from the HELENA dataset. We provide five base clusters of methods consisting of up to 10 methods that lay the foundation for devising hybrid development methods. The analysis of the five clusters using trained models reveals only a few context factors, e.g., project/product size and target application domain, that seem to significantly influence the selection of methods. An extended descriptive analysis of these practices in the context of the identified method clusters also suggests a consolidation of the relevant practice sets used in specific project contexts.