Agile Experience

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Agile Experience

• communication and collaboration in agile software
  development teams

Elizabeth Whitworth 7th September, 2006
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Research quest?on

• What is the experience of being in an agile
  software development team?

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Research quest?on
How do agile practices structure and mediate the
experience of individuals developing software?
What are the socio-psychological
characteristics surrounding agile practices and
individuals within a software development team?
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Study data

• 18 one-on-one interviews
• agile software development literature and
  community interaction

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Content of interviews

• cohesive vs. non-cohesive teams
• agile vs. non-agile teams
• personal experiences and/or team activity
• project characteristics

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Grounded theory

• theory generation
• line-by-line coding
• memoing and analysis of data
• results of study
• high level understanding
• confirmation from participants

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Cohesive teamwork

• strong feelings of excitement
• teams that clicked,gelled,really worked
  together

agile methodologies were seen to support team
cohesiveness more so than traditional software
development methodologies
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Agile practices

• the planning game
• continuous integration
• iterative development and delivery

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Agile practices

• daily stand-ups
• information radiators
• shared team rooms
• pairing

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Ease speed

• Agile culture
• openness, honesty
• ? transparent environment
• trust, respect
• ? action-based culture
• whole team involvement and availability
• ? frequent interaction and immersion

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Collective activity

• Buy-in to shared team goals
• provide the most business value to the customer
  in the least amount of time

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Collective activity

• prioritization chunking of activity
• development around working software
• ? ? ? ? ? ?
• reduce cognitive load
• importance and immediacy
• discipline and rigor
• clear measures of success

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holistic awareness understanding

• of team
• of project
• of product
• Context-rich information exchange and activity

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holistic awareness understanding

• team
• familiarity and understanding
• observe and refine working relationships
• project
• involvement and interest
• helping and support
• product
• purpose and meaning
• opportunistic action and collaboration

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Whole team awareness feedback

• constant feedback
• whole team awareness and understanding
• commitment towards team goals
• frequent and noticeable progress
• for example
• highly visible information radiators
• daily or weekly team meetings

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Whole team awareness feedback

• whole team agreement, approval, and action
• frequent and informal team interactions
• ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
• social accountability and responsibility
• recognition and appreciation
• support and motivation
• shared team goals
• self-regulating teams

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Conclusion

• detailed and transparent planning and activity
• certainty in the project environment
• social accountability and support
• Holistic understanding and competence
• security and control
• investment and involvement
• pride and ownership
• balance of structure and freedom
• individual freedom and initiative
• ability to assess relative importance of goals

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Next steps

• further investigation
• observational studies
• psychological literature
• areas for future study
• critical success factors
• negative phenomena
• agile practices
• application
• non-traditional contexts

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Quest?ons
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Conceptual framework

• Teamworking
• Self-regulating, self-managing,
  high-performance

sociotechnical systems theory the study of the
relationships and inter-relationships between the
social and technical parts of any system. -
Coakes (2000)
systems thinking holistic, emergent effects,
dynamics of regulation
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Study focus the agile system

• This study involved the agile system made up of
  individuals, agile technology, and the group as a
  whole

Particularly the relationships between system
entities interdependencies emergent effects,
such as flow feedback and feedforward
mechanisms effects of technology
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Interview data

• 18 interviews
• five developers, three interaction designers,
  five project managers, two agile coaches, three
  developers/project managers
• Recruited at conferences, and through contacts in
  the agile software development community
• 5 members of the same software development team
• Software development community
• agile software development conferences and
  workshops
• practitioner literature (print and online )
• online correspondence

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Conducting interviews

• Example Questions (initial)
• Could you pick a software development team that
  you found particularly enjoyable or exciting to
  work in and describe it to me?
• Could you describe the physical space the team
  was in?
• What was the experience of working in such a
  team?
• Did you feel that being in the same room
  effected your interactions with your team-mates?
  How so?
• Example Questions (later)
• Did you feel like you were part of the team?
  Why/why not?
• Did you feel that you were able to approach your
  team members to ask for help? Why/why not?
• How was responsibility divided among team
  members? How did you ensure that everything that
  needed to get done got done?

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Coding

• Coding occurred line-by-line and provided a means
  of comparison across diverse participant
  experiences
• Common themes were extracted as categories and
  explored across situations/participants

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Theoretical categories

• Theoretical categories and related properties and
  dimensions were developed based on codes and
  memos
• Diversity of data in this study, and complex
  nature of interactions made it difficult to
  define a core category about which to construct a
  comprehensive theory

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extra notes - awareness

• Details?

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extra notes - conclusion

• Success, progress and change