Positive experience of agile development methods in smaller projects has created interest in the applicability of such methods in larger scale projects. However, there is a lack of conceptual clarity regarding what large-scale agile software development is. This inhibits effective collaboration and progress in the research area. In this paper, we suggest a taxonomy of scale for agile software development projects that has the potential to clarify what topics researchers are studying and ease discussion of research priorities.

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What is Large in Large-Scale? A Taxonomy of Scale for Agile Software Development

Agile software development methods promise shorter time-to-market and higher product quality, but lack the ability of long-term planning or coping with large projects. However, software companies often also want the ability of long-term planning, promised by traditional or plan-based methods. To benefit from the strengths of both approaches, software companies often use a combination of agile and plan-based methods, known as hybrid development approaches. These approaches strongly depend on the individual context and are customized. Therefore, companies have to organize their hybrid development approach individually. However, practitioners often have difficulties with the organization of hybrid approaches. The organization considers how the phases, activities, roles, and artifacts are arranged and connected. Research lacks the necessary detailed insight into how hybrid development approaches are organized to support practitioners. To gain better understanding of the organization of hybrid approaches, we conducted a systematic literature review to gather descriptions of hybrid approaches. We analyzed the found papers thoroughly and could identify three general patterns of how hybrid approaches are organized. We found that all these patterns are still based on Royce's waterfall model and use the standard software engineering activities. Our findings shall help to lead further research and help practitioners to better organize their individual development approach.

How are Hybrid Development Approaches Organized?: A Systematic Literature Review

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Study on Agile Story Point Estimation Techniques and Challenges

User stories are a widely used artifact in Agile software development. Currently, only a limited number of secondary studies have reviewed the research on the user story technique. These research reviews focused on specific research topics related to ambiguity of requirements, effort estimation, and the application of Natural Language Processing. To our knowledge, a systematic mapping of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">all</i> user story research has not been performed. To this end, we study the academic literature to investigate what user stories research has been performed, what types of problems have been identified, what sort of solutions or other types of research outcomes have been achieved, how mature the research is, and what research gaps exist. We followed Systematic Mapping Study guidelines to synthesize the currently available academic research on user stories. In total, we found 186 unique peer-reviewed studies, published in the period 2001-2021. We observed that research on the user story technique and its use had grown exponentially over the last seven years. Further, using a five-dimensional classification framework– requirements engineering activity, problem class, outcome class, type of research, type of publication– we observed several patterns in the classification of these studies across the different framework dimensions, which provided insights into the state-of-the-art and maturity of the research. We also identified four research gaps: the paucity of focused literature reviews; a lack of research on the role that user stories play in human cognition and interaction; a lack of comprehensive and mature solutions for resolving ambiguity issues with user stories early in the project; and a lack of validation and evaluation of proposed solutions. Several research opportunities are suggested, making our paper a useful reference for future research on user stories allowing researchers to clearly position their contributions. 

/pdf/systematic-literature-mapping-of-user-story-research-2r104lj0.pdf

Systematic Literature Mapping of User Story Research

User stories are a widely used artifact in Agile software development. Currently, only a limited number of secondary studies have reviewed the research on the user story technique. These research reviews focused on specific research topics related to ambiguity of requirements, effort estimation, and the application of Natural Language Processing. To our knowledge, a systematic mapping of all user story research has not been performed. To this end, we study the academic literature to investigate what user stories research has been performed, what types of problems have been identified, what sort of solutions or other types of research outcomes have been achieved, how mature the research is, and what research gaps exist. We followed Systematic Mapping Study guidelines to synthesize the currently available academic research on user stories. In total, we found 186 unique peer-reviewed studies, published in the period 2001-2021. We observed that research on the user story technique and its use had grown exponentially over the last seven years. Further, using a five-dimensional classification framework– requirements engineering activity, problem class, outcome class, type of research, type of publication– we observed several patterns in the classification of these studies across the different framework dimensions, which provided insights into the state-of-the-art and maturity of the research. We also identified four research gaps: the paucity of focused literature reviews; a lack of research on the role that user stories play in human cognition and interaction; a lack of comprehensive and mature solutions for resolving ambiguity issues with user stories early in the project; and a lack of validation and evaluation of proposed solutions. Several research opportunities are suggested, making our paper a useful reference for future research on user stories allowing researchers to clearly position their contributions.

In developing enterprise information systems, it has been common to adopt a waterfall (WF)-type development method due to its adaptability to large-scale projects, high reliability, high efficiency in production, high estimation accuracy, and the like. Meanwhile, in recent years, the agile-type development method that repeats small releases is spreading as business environments change more intensely. For this reason, the development of a hybrid (HY)-type method that combines WF-type and agile-type development has attracted attention. Therefore, in this research, we report the result of examining the method that promotes rational development by considering the trade-off between cost reduction by simultaneous development of common objects as the overall optimality (the advantage of WF method) and early realization of value as local optimality (an advantage of agile method). For this purpose, we propose a method that achieves early realization of value and low cost by managing the relation between user stories and common objects in a matrix. Subsequently, we apply the proposed method to the basic design of a library information system and offer the results. In conclusion, we report cases where cost increases can be suppressed by delaying the value realization to some extent.

Kazuyuki Yaguchi

Papers

A Method of Setting the Order of User Story Development of an Agile-Waterfall Hybrid Method by Focusing on Common Objects