Abstract The number of companies that use agile methods increases steadily. However, these companies often do not implement a pure agile approach but combine agile and plan‐based methods to so‐called hybrid development approaches. However, the development of these approaches is rather difficult for the companies, since agile and plan‐based approaches often follow opposite concepts. To benefit from agile and plan‐based approaches at the same time, the companies have to identify and address the conflicts between agile and plan‐based methods. The conflicts depend on the goals that are pursued with the implementation of agile and plan‐based methods. However, there is no overview of the exact goals that are pursued in hybrid approaches and which challenges and conflicts arise with them. Therefore, we conducted a systematic mapping study to gather and analyze the goals and challenges in hybrid development approaches. The mapping study is focused on literature that presents the actual needs and goals of companies and projects. Based on our results, we present the influence factors that cause conflicts in hybrid approaches and discuss how these conflicts can be addressed.

Abstract Product Owners have an important role in the agile and hybrid software development process. While this role is supposed to maximize the value of a product, there seem to be several scattered results on how they achieve this, as well as what actually constitutes this role in practice. To consolidate current research results and to further analyze the key attribute of Product Owners, we conducted a multi‐method research approach spanning a systematic mapping study and a consecutive case study in a hybrid development environment. The results of the mapping study states that Product Owners are communicators. We further investigated on this and used the shadowing technique to observe three Product Owners' communication activities. The results support that statement, as the gained data reveal that Product Owners spend 65% of their time in meetings. But rather than just providing the team with the necessary requirements for the product under development, Product Owners need this time to synchronize and align their work, streamline the agile process of large‐scale Scrum, discuss team‐based topics, and to solve upcoming issues addressed by the team. These results contribute to draw a more comprehensive picture of the important but yet complex role of Product Owners in practice.

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.

Product Owners (PO) in the Scrum framework have an important role in the development process. While the POs primal description is straightforward - the actual implementation of this role in industries is not. Many companies face the difficulty of assigning the right level of tasks and responsibilities to this role. To provide solutions to this problem, the Product Owner role became a subject of research. However, most of the studies focus on the actual state of the role to propose solutions on how to tailor it. What is missing is the Scrum Teams perspective. Therefore, we were interested in the Teams expectations on the Product Owner role. Which tasks do they expect to be performed by this role and how would they characterize a perfect Product Owner? In an attempt to answer this question, we conducted an online survey in the oil and gas industry and gathered feedback from all members of the Scrum Team. Our findings indicate that the Scrum Team expects the Product Owner to write user stories and prioritize the backlog solely. Other tasks are expected to be done either in direct collaboration with the management or the scrum master or are not expected to be done by the Product Owner role at all. Also, the respondents would characterize a perfect Product Owner primarily as trustworthy.

Product Owners in the Scrum framework - respectively the On-site Customer when applying eXtreme Programming - have an important role in the development process. The Scrum Guide states that this role is responsible for the requirements and maximizing the value of the product. However, the implementation of this role depends on the individual, the organization and the team and is perceived as difficult in industry. Various research approaches provide insights in the applied PO role in industry - yet, a conclusive bigger picture of the studies and reports on this issue is missing. To fill this gap, we conducted a systematic mapping study. Our findings structure the research area of Product Owners in industry in terms of research topics and applied research methods. In total, we identified 30 contributions addressing seven research topics and generated consolidated answers for each of them. While some of those topics provide congruent results, others point to gaps in current research: So is the PO role in large-scale projects clearly defined as a group effort, but questions regarding the leadership and management responsibilities of POs remain unanswered. Also, the impact of external circumstances on the PO role is a question that is worth to answer in future work.

Information sharing in teams is one of the most important aspects of successful software development. For instance, requirements, design decisions and guidelines need to be communicated with the whole team or with specific team members. For information exchange, communication is mandatory. Meetings are an effective way to communicate with many team members. Hence, much information can be shared during team meetings. But meeting and communication behavior may vary. During the project, the team members get to know the others more and more. This has an influence on the chosen ways of information sharing and hence changes communication behavior.We are interested in analyzing the influence of meetings on team-internal communication and collaboration. To analyze collaboration, we consider a measure of indirections representing used communication channels and the perceived communication intensity between each of the team members. In a study with 65 students across eight development teams, we examine how intensively team members used various communication channels and if there is a change in communication and meeting behavior over time.In our study, the communication behavior becomes increasingly effective during the development process and the number of team meetings decreases in the course of the project. Moreover, the teams decentralize their communication behavior during project progress. According to our results, there is no cause for concern if there are less or shorter meetings at the end than at the beginning of a project.