Does Agile lead to secure software?

According to some Norwegian researchers, agile software development in small and medium sized enterprises does not result in more secure software. Their solution is to make some ‘extensions’ to agile development methodology. I am sceptical. I think it would be a matter of how the agile methods are applied not what they are if one wants to achieve any particular goal.

Agile Meetings and Motivation

There are three key, recurrent meetings in Agile practice:

• Iteration planning,
• Daily meeting and
• Retrospective meeting

Do these meetings contribute to team motivation or de-motivation? According to a recent study “Motivating Agile Teams: A Case Study of Teams in Ireland and Sweden” it depends.

Sorry, but I am not going to pay to read any further than the abstract but if someone will donate a copy to me I promise to write about any other sensational findings in the paper.

References

• [2010,inproceedings] bibtex
  O. McHugh, K. Conboy, and M. Lang, "Motivating Agile Teams: A Case Study of Teams in Ireland and Sweden," in International Research Workshop on IT Project Management 2010, 2010.
  @inproceedings{citeulike:9846555, abstract = {This research is an exploratory study, which investigates how the use of three agile practices - the daily stand-up, iteration planning and iteration retrospective - may contribute to motivation or de-motivation in an agile team in two different European countries; namely Ireland and Sweden. Several studies recognize that motivation is an important issue in software development and have identified factors that motivate software developers. However, relatively little is known about motivation in an agile context or how agile practices may impact on team motivation. Seventeen individuals across two teams were interviewed. The results indicate that in both countries agile practices can contribute to team motivation and de-motivation. This study hopes to make an important contribution towards research efforts in the area of motivation and agile software development by identifying factors that can contribute to and inhibit motivation in agile software development teams.},
  author = {McHugh, Orla and Conboy, Kieran and Lang, Michael},
  booktitle = {International Research Workshop on IT Project Management 2010},
  citeulike-article-id = {9846555},
  citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://aisel.aisnet.org/irwitpm2010/8/},
  keywords = {20101119},
  posted-date = {2011-10-03 10:35:15},
  priority = {2},
  title = {Motivating Agile Teams: A Case Study of Teams in Ireland and Sweden},
  url = {http://aisel.aisnet.org/irwitpm2010/8/},
  year = {2010}
}

Agile and TMS

I have only read the abstract of “The Antecedents and Consequences of Agile Practices: A Multi-Period Empirical Study of Software Teams in Time-Bound Projects” but the title and the abstract were interesting enough to warrant a comment on the blog.

The researchers have studied groups of student as they have worked on a project in three “waves” (iterations?). They found that

project performance does not improve through the use of agile practices alone, but does improve when task variability is high and the project team has a high degree of TMS.

TMS (transactive memory system) on the other hand is a consequence of the use of agile practices. It seems rather circular does it not? High TMS teams perform well in an agile environment which (supposedly) leads to high TMS etc.

As far as I understand the concept, the transactive memory of a team is the joint ability of the team to know who knows or should learn what. If my understanding is complete that would mean that the authors here have found that good, cohesive teams will perform better and that teams who work together will become better teams.

The real nugget in here is perhaps in the Wikipedia article. Read this carefully!

Moreland & Myaskovsky (2000) have shown that transactive memory can be developed without any interaction between teammates. As a substitute to teammates’ communication they used a feedback summarizing team members’ skills in the relevant task and team members’ domains of expertise, which was given to each team member by the researches, before they started performing the task. Although the feedback and the information regarding teammates knowledge was provided by the researches and teammates did not communicate with each other in the encoding stage, a strong transactive memory system was formed and affected positively the team’s performance[17]. The decisive component in the formation of transactive memory is sharing specific information regarding team members’ knowledge and domains of expertise, which is achieved whether by interactions taking place during shared learning, or by any other means of information transformation.

What all this means to me is that

1. Having good TMS will improve performance in agile teams.
2. There is a shortcut to good TMS which is to simply produce a list of team members’ main knowledge areas and distribute them in the team.

Does TMS have further consequences? Perhaps it will also affect pair programming or politics? Perhaps you can webbify your TMS support? On a vaguely related note, it might impact who you should recruit to fill a gap in your team.