human-computer interaction

Future directions in Agile research: Alignment and divergence between research and practice

Innovation initiatives in large software companies: a systematic mapping study

This extended abstract summarises an article, which has been published in the Information and Software Technology (IST) Journal and was selected for the Journal-First presentations at the International Conference on Software and System Process (ICSSP 2018). Full Article Reference. Henry Edison, Xiaofeng Wang, Ronald Jabangwe, and Pekka Abrahamsson. 2018. Innovation Initiatives in Large Software Companies: A Systematic Mapping Study. Information and Software Technology, 95:1--14, (March 2018) DOI:10.1016/j.infsof.2017.12.007.

Are Software Startups Applying Agile Practices? The State of the Practice from a Large Survey

Software startups operate under various uncertainties and the demand on their ability to deal with change is high. Agile methods are considered a suitable and viable development approach for them. However, the competing needs for speed and quality may render certain agile practices less suitable than others in the startup context. The adoption of agile practices can be further complicated in software startups that adopt the Lean Startup approach. To make the best of agile practices, it is necessary to first understand whether and how they are used in software startups. This study targets at a better understanding of the use of agile practices in software startups, with a particular focus on lean startups. Based on a large survey of 1526 software startups, we examined the use of five agile practices, including quality related (regular refactoring and test first), speed related (frequent release and agile planning) and communication practice (daily standup meeting). The findings show that speed related agile practices are used to a greater extent in comparison to quality practices. Daily standup meeting is least used. Software startups who adopt the Lean Startup approach do not sacrifice quality for speed more than other startups do.

Female Leadership in Software Projects: A Preliminary Result on Leadership Style and Project Context Factors

Women have been shown to be effective leaders in many team-based situations. However, it is also well-recognized that women are underrepresented in engineering and technology areas, which leads to wasted efforts and a lack of diversity in professional organizations. Although studies about gender and leadership are rich, research focusing on engineering-specific activities, are scarce. To react on this gap, we explored the experience of female leaders of software development projects and possible context factors that influence leadership effectiveness. The study was conducted as a longitudinal multiple case study. Data was collected from survey, interviews, observation and project reports. In this work, we reported some preliminary findings related to leadership style, team perception on leadership and team-task context factors. We found a strong correlation between perceived team leadership and task management. We also observed a potential association between human-oriented leading approach in low customer involvement scenarios and task-oriented leading approach in high customer involvement situations.

What Influences the Speed of Prototyping? An Empirical Investigation of Twenty Software Startups

It is essential for startups to quickly experiment business ideas by building tangible prototypes and collecting user feedback on them. As prototyping is an inevitable part of learning for early stage software startups, how fast startups can learn depends on how fast they can prototype. Despite of the importance, there is a lack of research about prototyping in software startups. In this study, we aimed at understanding what are factors influencing different types of prototyping activities. We conducted a multiple case study on twenty European software startups. The results are two folds; firstly we propose a prototype-centric learning model in early stage software startups. Secondly, we identify factors occur as barriers but also facilitators for prototyping in early stage software startups. The factors are grouped into (1) artifacts, (2) team competence, (3) collaboration, (4) customer and (5) process dimensions. To speed up a startup’s progress at the early stage, it is important to incorporate the learning objective into a well-defined collaborative approach of prototyping.

Coopetition of Software Firms in Open Source Software Ecosystems

Software firms participate in an ecosystem as a part of their innovation strategy to extend value creation beyond the firm’s boundary. Participation in an open and independent environment also implies the competition among firms with similar business models and targeted markets. Hence, firms need to consider potential opportunities and challenges upfront. This study explores how software firms interact with others in OSS ecosystems from a coopetition perspective. We performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of three OSS projects. Finding shows that software firms emphasize the co-creation of common value and partly react to the potential competitiveness on OSS ecosystems. Six themes about coopetition were identified, including spanning gatekeepers, securing communication, open-core sourcing and filtering shared code. Our work contributes to software engineering research with a rich description of coopetition in OSS ecosystems. Moreover, we also come up with several implications for software firms in pursing a harmony participation in OSS ecosystems.

Combining Social Service and Healthcare as the First Country in the World : Exploring the Impacts on Information Systems

The Finnish government has decided to implement a reform in the social and healthcare system by combining the two in the future. There are several drivers for this change that have been identified. Large number of information systems that are not interoperable, challenges in data management and isolated service offering are the most significant ones. In the government’s strategy for the future the digitalisation will provide tools to solve these challenges. In this paper the landscape is outlined and the architecture choices are discussed. The enterprise architecture is applied for the largest county comprising of over 1900 social service and healthcare related information systems. The target is to design one joint system with maximum of 300 supporting information systems resulting in 3 B EUR savings.

Lean Internal Startups for Software Product Innovation in Large Companies: Enablers and Inhibitors

To compete in this age of disruption, large companies cannot rely on cost efficiency, lead time reduction and quality improvement. They are now looking for ways to innovate like startups. Meanwhile, the awareness and use of the Lean startup approach have grown rapidly amongst the software startup community in recent years. This study investigates how Lean internal startup facilitates software product innovation in large companies and identifies its enablers and inhibitors. A multiple case study approach is followed in the investigation. Two software product innovation projects from two large companies are examined, using a conceptual framework that is based on the method-in-action framework and extended with the previously developed Lean-Internal Corporate Venture model. Seven face-to-face in-depth interviews of the employees with different roles are conducted. Within-case analysis and cross-case comparison are applied to draw the findings from the cases. A generic process flow summarises the common key processes of Lean internal startups. The findings suggest that an internal startup that is initiated management or employees faces different challenges. A list of enablers of applying Lean startup in large companies are identified, including top management support and cross-functional team. Both cases face different inhibitors due to the different process of inception, objective of the team and type of the product. Our contributions are threefold. First, this study is one of the first attempt to investigate the use of Lean startup approach in large companies empirically. Second, the study shows the potential of the method-in-action framework to investigate the Lean startup approach in non-startup context. The third is a general process of Lean internal startup and the evidence of the enablers and inhibitors of implementing it, which are both theory-informed and empirically grounded.

The Key Concepts of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

The growing influence and decision-making capacities of Autonomous systems and Artificial Intelligence in our lives force us to consider the values embedded in these systems. But how ethics should be implemented into these systems? In this study, the solution is seen on philosophical conceptualization as a framework to form practical implementation model for ethics of AI. To take the first steps on conceptualization main concepts used on the field needs to be identified. A keyword based Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) on the keywords used in AI and ethics was conducted to help in identifying, defying and comparing main concepts used in current AI ethics discourse. Out of 1062 papers retrieved SMS discovered 37 re-occurring keywords in 83 academic papers. We suggest that the focus on finding keywords is the first step in guiding and providing direction for future research in the AI ethics field.

Software startup education: gamifying growth hacking

Startups seek to create highly scalable business models. For startups, growth is thus vital. Growth hacking is a marketing strategy advocated by various startup practitioner experts. It focuses on using low cost practices while utilizing existing platforms in creative ways to gain more users for the service. Though topics related to growth hacking such as marketing on a general level have been extensively studied in the past, growth hacking as a practitioner-born topic has not seen much interest among the academia. To both spark interest in growth hacking, and to facilitate teaching growth hacking in the academia, we present two board games intended to serve as an engaging introduction to growth hacking for students.

Agile Software Development Methods: A Comparative Review1

Although agile software development methods have caught the attention of software engineers and researchers worldwide, scientific research still remains quite scarce. The aim of this study is to order and make sense of the different agile approaches that have been proposed. This comparative review is performed from the standpoint of using the following features as the analytical perspectives: project management support, life-cycle coverage, type of practical guidance, adaptability in actual use, type of research objectives and existence of empirical evidence. The results show that agile software development methods cover, without offering any rationale, different phases of the software development life-cycle and that most of these methods fail to provide adequate project management support. Moreover, quite a few methods continue to offer little concrete guidance on how to use their solutions or how to adapt them in different development situations. Empirical evidence after ten years of application remains quite limited. Based on the results, new directions on agile methods are outlined.

Exploring Virtual Reality as an Integrated Development Environment for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) development approaches tend to start from the physical (hardware) perspective, and the software is the final element in the process. However, this approach is unfit for the more software-intensive world that is increasingly iterative, connected, and constantly online. Many constraints prevent the application of iterative, incremental, and agile development methodologies, which now are the norm for many other fields of software. Time-consuming system validation can only start when both hardware and software components are ready, which implies that the software delivery and quality is almost always the final bottleneck in the CPS development and integration. Also organizational issues raise concerns - CPS development teams are nowadays often geographically distributed, which can result in delays in the process, shortcomings, and even mistakes. In this paper, we propose using our envisioned open-source Virtual Reality-based Integrated software Development Environment (VRIDE) for developing the next generation, increasingly software-intensive CPSs in efficient ways.