Modern software applications, notably those utilizing microservices architectures, rely heavily on REST API technology for communication. Testing these APIs is challenging, time-consuming, and prone to errors. This paper introduces Pulse-UI, an AI-supported tool designed to enhance test sequence generation for REST APIs, aiming to reduce the workload involved in managing test sequences efficiently and improve overall test quality.

Many organizations implementing DevOps are adopting DORA metrics to measure their capabilities. Surveys are commonly used to gather the DORA metric data. The data are typically captured only in longer intervals, and on the team level, omitting important details on individual software systems. In this paper, we present a solution that enables completely automated measurement and calculation of the DORA metrics from DevOps tooling on individual microservices level, and in real-time.We evaluated the developed solution in an industrial case study consisting of 37 microservices over a four-week period. The evaluation demonstrated the ability for a completely automated DORA metrics calculation which provides much greater transparency for data-driven decision-making and optimizations on a more fine-granular level allowing teams to continually improve their software processes and outputs.

Abstract Little research has been done on enabling software development teams to self-report waste to assist in productivity improvement. This study created a waste categorization and survey for teams to identify and quantify wasteful activities. Developers from a Swiss company used the survey for three weeks. Participants found the survey helpful for identifying waste but there was little evidence that self-reported waste correlated with improved performance.

Abstract Card walls are often used to visualize various aspects of the software development process. They are an essential and widespread agile practice. Despite the drawback of physical card walls, its digital version is often not considered a sufficient alternative. This paper aims to find the reason for this and suggests how to evolve digital card walls into a viable alternative. We conducted a systematic literature review and analyzed twenty-two studies. We identified which desirable effects agile teams get from card wall usage and derived a set of properties a card wall needs to achieve those effects. Furthermore, we suggested a typology of card walls to compare the benefits and challenges among them.

Abstract The principles in the Agile Manifesto, the Scrum Guide and most other approaches to agile software development emphasize self-organizing teams, but rarely address issues of leadership. In this paper we report on a study of the nature of different aspects of leadership in agile teams. We used an established model of leadership, distinguishing transactional and transformational styles, and asked IT professionals a set of questions about the leadership they experience, both from direct supervisors (hierarchical leadership) and from the team itself (shared leadership). We determined correlation measures of these four types of leadership with the extent of agility in the whole organization. Our results show that agility is indeed related to the transformational style, but that the transactional style also plays a part, especially as shared leadership. Furthermore, even in highly agile software development, leadership by direct supervisors still plays an important role. We propose that, as software development becomes more agile, the transactional aspects of leadership may shift away from the leadership dyad between supervisor and employee into the agile team, while transformational leadership is important for both the team and supervisors. We discuss our results in light of applications for both research and practice.

Abstract The Four Key Metrics of DevOps have become very popular for measuring IT-performance and DevOps adoption. However, the measurement of the four metrics deployment frequency, lead time for change, time to restore service and change failure rate is often done manually and through surveys - with only few data points. In this work we evaluated how the Four Key Metrics can be measured automatically and developed a prototype for the automatic measurement of the Four Key Metrics. We then evaluated if the measurement is valuable for practitioners in a company. The analysis shows that the chosen measurement approach is both suitable and the results valuable for the team with respect to measuring and improving the software delivery performance.

Keeping track of the progress on software projects can be difficult and time consuming. Progress tracking requires developers to track progress by hand or digitally neither of which have good support for collaborative team processes. In this paper we present DashVis a tool to help support teams to track progress more effectively using large touch displays and visualization techniques. We conducted a study and found the visualizations to be very effective in supporting teams to gain a more accurate way of keeping track of progress. With large touch displays becoming ubiquitous in the work place and the demand for software teams to understand their progress more effectively there is a need for tools like DashVis.

The principles behind the Agile Manifesto begin with "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer...". It also states that Agile projects should be build around motivated and self-organized teams, which might also lead to more satisfied developers. Several studies indeed report an increased job satisfaction by anecdotal evidence. In this paper we address the topic of satisfaction by in-depth analysis of the results of a nationwide survey about software development in Switzerland. We wanted to find out if satisfaction depends on the applied development method, and, more concrete, how satisfaction relates to other elements in the development process, including the use of various practices, and the influences on business, team and software issues. We found that higher satisfaction is reported more by those using Agile development than with plan-driven processes. We explored the different perspectives of developers and those with a management role and found a high consistency of satisfaction between Agile developers and Agile management, and big differences with using working plan-driven methods. We found that certain practices and influences have high correlations to satisfaction, and that collaborative processes are closely related to satisfaction, especially when combined with technical practices. Applying recursive partitioning, we found which elements were most important for satisfaction, and gained insight about how practices and influences work in combination. We also explored the relationship between satisfaction and personal experience with Agile development. Our results in this analysis are principally descriptive, but we think they can be a relevant contribution to understand the challenges for everyone involved in Agile development, and can help in the transformation to Agile.

Collaboration and communication are key to successful agile software development. Respect, openness, transparency and trust are core Agile values. However studies show, that there is a shortage of software developers with these skills. How can we teach these skills to software engineering students' This paper presents the approach of using a multi-week Scrum Paper City simulation game. The course execution was accompanied by a thorough evaluation to find out how effective this approach is compared to traditional ex-cathedra teaching. While the evaluation shows some aspects to be improved, it clearly shows that students like to experience the Agile approach directly in a project, that they enjoy more fun, and the collaboration in the team.

Agile software development has become mainstream, and with it many tools have been developed to support Agile software development. Nonetheless, studies show, that most Agile software teams still also use physical cardboards for their daily work. This is error prone and causes a lot of extra effort to keep both in sync. In our research project we conducted an interview study about the reasons for this media break. Based on the findings we developed visualization and interaction concepts for an Agile cardwall using an extra-large multi-touch wall display which provides Agile teams the lightweight collaboration workspace for their Agile meetings. We implemented the concepts in the software prototype aWall , and evaluated the usability of aWall in a user study. The evaluation indicates that aWall enables and encourages team work due to the large size of the wall, the easy accessibility and visibility of the needed information, and the integration with existing issue tracking tools. This suggests that augmenting digital cardwalls with large interactive touch technology and integration with task tracking systems is a useful way to support effective collaborative Agile software development processes.

Agile methodologies like Scrum or Extreme Programming have come a long way over the last fifteen years. Recent quantitative studies show that many companies have successfully adopted agile methodologies. It was found that in agile software development, experience leads to collaboration. It could also be shown that successful professional agile teams tend to use more collaboration practices. In 2013, the new Computer Science studies at the University of Applied Sciences were started. For this, a new curriculum was developed. This paper presents and discusses the lectures, labs and educational software projects in the programming and software engineering modules. It is discussed how agile collaboration and collaboration practices can be taught in the classroom. For this, the setup and observations of an agile student project are presented and different online collaboration tools are discussed. It is argued that software engineering education benefits significantly from embracing the modern collaboration tools the Internet has made available.

Communication and collaboration are central skills for agile development. Trust, openness, transparency and equality are core agile values and there is a shortage of software developers with these skills. How can we teach software engineering so that students get these skills together with the needed technical competences? This paper presents and discusses the setup of an innovative agile educational student project. The didactical concept is based on results from several industry studies, which give insight into the required competencies of agile software developers.

Recent studies show that many companies have successfully adopted agile methodologies. In this paper the authors present results of their quantitative and qualitative studies, showing that only experienced companies apply agile collaboration practices properly. The studies also suggest that successful professional agile teams tend to use more collaboration practices and consciously live the agile values. This leads to the conclusion that applying the collaborative practices and living the agile values is difficult. Thus we educators should pay special attention to teaching these practices and values in courses on agile software development. This paper presents how agile collaboration is being taught in the classroom in a fourth semester software engineering module and explains the underlying assumptions. We use an agile coaching game as introduction to Scrum and discuss the mechanics of agile teams in the classroom. We present the setup of a hands-on agile student project with large student teams and the observations we made. Last but not least, we show and discuss how modern online collaboration tools act as enablers for agile collaboration in the classroom.

Agile methods are widely adopted in software development. They are based on agile principles that sharply contrast to traditional command-and-control management methods. Such methods emphasize the importance of highly interactive self-organizing teams and close collaboration of all stakeholders, as well as values like courage, openness and respect. However, recent studies show that graduates and undergraduates of computer science often lack the collaborative and communicative skills necessary for agile methods and, thus, are not yet well enough educated for agile development approaches. Therefore, new approaches or more adequate educational methods for teaching the necessary communication and collaboration skills need to be developed. In a recent interview study, the authors elicited specific collaboration and communication skills needed in agile teams. In this paper, we present results from this study and discuss teaching concepts for collaboration skills from both engineering and psychological points of view. We suggest an approach on how to integrate these concepts into university courses, that focuses on active learning of agile collaboration. We have started implementing the proposed concept in a software engineering course and report on the experiences we have made and on the challenges that we have encountered.

Ten years ago, it was usual that projects in the software industry ran on for years before the customer was able to lay his hands on the product he had ordered. This often resulted in delays, budget overruns and disappointing deliverables. During the last decade, the Agile approach has been taking over software project management, shortening product development cycles from a few years to a few weeks or even days. Recently, the agile approach has even been used for developing a new car which runs 100 miles per gallon [1]. Several recent surveys [2], [3] show that agile methodologies like Scrum, Extreme Programming or Kanban have successfully been adopted by many companies to develop software. However, agile methodologies do not come for free. A different set of skills, or agile practices as they are called, are necessary for the software engineers in order to be able to sucessfully deliver high-quality software at the end of every iteration. The same surveys show that only few of the agile practices are used and even fewer are applied consequently and thoroughly. This is to a great extent due to the lack of skilled software engineers. Although teaching agile software development has drawn some attention in recent research, we do not yet seem to be able to “deliver” the appropriately skilled engineers. What is the reason for this, and more importantly, how can we improve the situation? In this position paper we propose a more holistic approach for teaching agile software engineering, in which the required agile practices and values are not only integrated theoretically but also practically applied and repeated until they become a habit to students and software engineers.

Agile methodologies have come a long way over the last decade. Several recent surveys show that agile methodologies like Scrum, Extreme Programming and, more recently, Kanban have been successfully adopted by many companies to develop their software. However, the same surveys show that only few of the agile practices are used and even fewer are applied consequently and thoroughly. This is to a great extent due to the lack of skilled personnel. Although teaching agile software development has drawn some attention in recent research and has been discussed in several papers, we do not yet seem to be able to “deliver” the appropriately skilled personnel. What is the reason for this, and more importantly, how can we improve the situation? In this paper we propose a more holistic approach for teaching agile software development, in which the required agile practices and values are not only integrated theoretically into our courses but also practically applied and repeated until they become a habit to our graduates. The proposed concept was realized in a new Software Engineering course held at Zurich University of Applied Sciences during 2012. The evaluation shows very encouraging results, but also leaves some challenges and problems to be solved.