In a small study, three different projects were examined with respect to the degree that they used eXtreme Programming practices and what the code looked like in terms of size, complexity and coupling. The conclusion was that more agile practices used in a project lead to lower size, complexity and…
With automated bug fixing, we can automatically fix 50% of all bugs at a cost of $8. A fantastic research result from the small world of Software Engineering research. But how can we turn these inventions into innovations? References [bibtex file=http://www.citeulike.org/bibtex/user/greger/tag/20120308?fieldmap=posted-at:posted-date&clean_urls=0]
I did my Ph.D. thesis on how network factors can predict and influence user satisfaction in wireless networks. I.e. how “hard” but low-level technical factors have an impact on more abstract entities. Hegedűs et al does something similar but for source code metrics and their impact on maintainability. It has…
Surprisingly, perhaps, after over a decade of Agile methods there are still a lot of organizations that are not agile or are doing it badly? Why? According to one survey there are nine critical success factors for successfully introducing Agile Software Development in an organization.
Which are the key agile practices? Researchers José Fortuna Abrantes and Guilherme Horta Travassos combed the research literature and were able to identify 12 key agile practices: test driven development, continuous integration, pair programming, planning game, onsite customer, collective code ownership, small releases, metaphor, refactoring, sustainable pace, simple design and…
In a large study of the effects of switching to agile ways of working at a unit of Ericsson in Sweden researchers Kai Petersen and Claes Wohlin found a number of issues with Agile Software Development but far fewer than with the previous plan driven approach. The table below shows…
Yesterday, I wrote about the methodological challenges of correlation based research on software artefacts. The article which is the base for this post also has a fundamental methodological flaw. McHugh, Conboy and Lang have perfomed a post hoc study of trust in agile software development teams where they asked the…
In a brilliant and hilarious article Zeller, Zimmerman and Bird points out how easy it is to find correlations when mining software archives. In the article, their (mock) argument is that all program errors must enter the source code through the keyboard and thus certain keys introduce more errors. By…
Why do, or don’t, organizations adopt agile practices? Vijayasarathy and Turk study this issue in a paper published less than a month ago. They found that perceived norms and training are significant factors in promoting adoption of agile methods. Perceived benefits – such as the fact that TDD really does…
In a recent, well written but smallish study, a team of researchers from Finland have tried to find where KanBan has benefits. In their setup, teams of master students were instructed to use KanBan in their software development projects and then interviewed about their subjective perception of the benefits of…
