Abstract In times of crises, such as the refugee crisis or the corona pandemic, the workload in public administrations increases because of the demands of citizens or short-term legal changes. In addition, there is an increasing need for digitalization or to be able to react flexibly to changes. Agile process models and agile practices are appropriate to overcome these challenges. The objective of this paper is to investigate how public administrations can measure their degree of agility to identify potential for improving it. The authors conducted a descriptive single-case study which included multiple units of analysis in a public administration in Germany. The case study was supported by their questionnaire for measuring the degree of agility. One outcome of this study is a conceptual framework that can be used to drive agile transformation in public administrations by continuously measuring agility. Therefore, a questionnaire for measuring agility at team level in public administrations has been developed. The application of the questionnaire in three teams provide insights into dysfunctionality in the interdisciplinary teams as well as optimization potential in terms of affinity to change. The adoption of agility in public administration is a challenge, given that resistance to change is still prevalent. A transformational change is a constant journey, and therefore, the measurement of progress plays an important role in the continuous improvement of an organization. The applied approach delivers high potential for improvement in terms of agility and provides interesting insights for both practitioners and academics.

The integration of Agile software development and User Experience (UX) has become a growing field of research, as both approaches play critical roles in building digital products and services. In this special issue on Agile UX, the current state of the field is explored through a combination of systematic literature reviews and qualitative and quantitative studies. The special issue provide an overview of the key trends, challenges, and successes in combining Agile and UX, and highlight the importance of involving stakeholders throughout development. The shift from plan-driven approaches to Agile UX approaches has brought a focus on human values and a better understanding of the importance of considering users’ needs. We present recent advances in research and practice, showing that Agile UX is a continuous journey towards changing user behavior by delivering value.

Particularly in times of crisis, it is apparent that the digital transformation in Germany has not yet progressed far enough. Public administrations are confronted with legally prescribed obligations to implement e-government and digitization projects in the near future. Project work and the involvement of users in the implementation are increasingly coming into focus. The objective of this paper is to identify the challenges in project work in the context of the implementation of e-government and digitalization projects in public administration. This was done by comparing survey results from 2018 and 2021 and analyzing whether agility can make a decisive contribution to eliminating these challenges. Moreover, it was investigated whether user involvement in implementation is already taking place. This study was conducted for the first time in 2018 and again in 2021 using an online survey. The two samples of the questionnaire study (2018 and 2021) show, that public administrations are increasingly coming into contact with agile methods. Furthermore, challenges were identified that limit improved project work in public administrations and that need to be addressed.

Abstract: The corona pandemic has shown how important it is to be able to react quickly to changing conditions. In many organizations, agile process models and agile practices are used for this purpose. This paper examines how agility can be implemented in higher education. Using two case studies, we analyze how agile practices and agile values are implemented for knowledge and skills development. Our results present a student-centered approach where lecturers supported self-organized learning. In the student-centered approach, prior knowledge and experience of learners are taken into account, and the learning process is adjusted through continuous feedback. With the introduction of agility, a value shift towards value-based learning is taking place. Value-based learning supports competency-based teaching since the focus is less on imparting technical knowledge and more on imparting competencies.

The integration of Human-Centered Design into agile product development can be challenging. In particular, the application of established user research and UX design methods within short feedback cycles frequently leads to discussions. This article provides an overview of the development and current state of research in Agile UX. In particular, we analyse Lean UX and answer the following questions: How can user research be implemented in agile product development and which best practices can be used to achieve it? For this purpose, we conducted a literature review and analysed how user research in agile product development has progressed in recent years. We discuss an approach that leverages identified best practices for Agile UX by introducing a new model for integrating Lean UX with Scrum to address the needs of the users more strongly in agile product development. We conclude that existing best practices and patterns already aim to adapt established user research methods to the agile framework. Lean UX provides a suitable approach to integrate such user research methods for use in agile product development. This approach has the potential to improve the user experience.

Abstract Context: Twenty years after the publication of the agile manifesto, agility is becoming more and more popular in different contexts. Agile values are changing the way people work together and influence people’s mindset as well as the culture of organizations. Many organizations have understood that continuous improvement is based on measurement. Objective: The objective of this paper is to present how agility can be measured at the team level. For this reason, we will introduce our questionnaire for measuring agility, which is based on the agile values of the manifesto. Method: We developed a questionnaire comprising 36 items that measure the current state of a team’s agility in six dimensions (communicative, change-affine, iterative, self-organized, product-driven and improvement-oriented). This questionnaire has been evaluated with respect to several expert reviews and in a case study. Results: The questionnaire provides a method for measuring the current state of agility, which takes the individual context of the team into account. Furthermore, our research shows, that this technique enables the user to uncover dysfunctionalities in a team. Conclusion: Practitioners and organizations can use our questionnaire to optimize collaboration within their teams in terms of agility. In particular, the value delivery of an organization can be increased by optimizing collaboration at the team level. The development of this questionnaire is a continuous learning process with the aim to develop a standardized questionnaire for measuring agility.

Agile methods are designed for handling uncertainty as well as reducing risks in product development through transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Applying an effective risk management is in the nature of agile methods. However, when multiple agile teams work on the same product, a higher coordination effort is required and more formal practices are applied. The objective of this paper is to study how risk management can be improved in a scaled agile environment. Therefore, we conducted a case study in a large-sized ecommerce company and interviewed several project managers. The results show that there are differences for risk management in terms of two contexts. On the one hand, informal risk management is rated as good enough for one autonomous team. On the other hand, more formal approaches are needed, when several teams work on the same requirement. Furthermore, a tool for the support of risk management in a scaled agile environment is presented. We can conclude that hybrid development approaches consisting of agile practices and traditional practices, are beneficial, when several teams work in parallel.

In recent years hybrid approaches focusing on user needs by integrating Agile methodologies (e.g. Scrum, Kanban or Extreme Programming) with Human-Centered Design (HCD) have proven to be particularly suitable for the development of Web systems. On the one hand, HCD techniques are used for requirements elicitation and, on the other hand, they can be utilized to elicit navigation relationships in Web projects. Navigation is one of the basic pillars of Web systems and also a fundamental element for the methodologies within the Model-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) field. This paper presents an approach to model Agile requirements by means of integrating HCD techniques into Agile software development. We contribute to the software development body of knowledge by creating the concept of a Context-based Persona Story (CBPS) and formalizing it through a metamodel. Our approach covers the modelling of users and stakeholders by personas as well as the visualization of the context of use by storyboards. The attributes of the context of use enable us to elicit acceptance criteria for describing the scope of an Agile requirement.

Agile Software Development (ASD) is becoming more popular in all fields of industry. For an agile transformation, organizations need to continuously improve their established approaches to Requirements Engineering (RE) as well as their approaches to software development. This is accompanied by some challenges in terms of agile RE. The main objective of this paper is to identify the most important challenges in agile RE industry has to face today. Therefore, we conducted an iterative expert judgement process with 26 experts in the field of ASD, comprising three complementary rounds. In sum, we identified 20 challenges in three rounds. Six of these challenges are defined as key challenges. Based on the results, we provide options for dealing with those key challenges by means of agile techniques and tools. The results show that the identified challenges are often not limited to ASD, but they rather refer to software development in general. Therefore, we can conclude that organizations still struggle with agile transition and understanding agile values, in particular, in terms of stakeholder and user involvement.

Industrie 4.0 (English translation: Industry 4.0) stands for functional integration, dynamic reorganization, and resource efficiency. Technical advances in control and communication create infrastructures that handle more and more tasks automatically. As a result, the complexity of today's and future technical systems is hidden from the user. These advances, however, come with distinct challenges for user interface design. A central question is: how to empower users to understand, monitor, and control the automated processes of Industrie 4.0? Addressing these design challenges requires a full integration of user-centered design (UCD) processes into the development process. This paper discusses flexible but powerful methods for usability and user experience engineering in the context of Industrie 4.0.