Gaining an understanding of the state of an organisation’s culture during Agile transformation is important because culture underpins all aspects of an organisation’s way of working and can indicate how successful the transformation has been. This paper explores the impact of Agile transformation on various dimensions of organisational culture over time within a technology organisation. Additionally, it demonstrates how datasets collected using the Pulse survey instrument, a tool for assessing an organisation’s culture, can be analysed to provide actionable insights to support organisations in their cultural transformation efforts. This paper employs a mixed research method to conduct a post-hoc analysis of the datasets obtained from a technology organisation that utilised the survey instrument in 2021 and 2022 to assess its transformation agenda. The collected data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. We also assess the internal reliability and validity of the instrument using Cronbach’s Alpha, Composite Reliability, factor loadings and Average Variance Extracted. Results show that all the Alpha values of the instrument fall between 0.744 and 0.901, which are higher than the satisfactory value of 0.700, indicating acceptable to excellent reliability. After the intervention, the targeted cultural area, that is, Trust and Transparency (TT) improved significantly, and there was a general improvement across almost all areas. The organisation found the insights provided by the survey instrument aided their understanding of the change process. This study presents an analysis framework to support organisations using or seeking to use the Pulse survey instrument in their efforts to transform culture. The findings validate the use of statistical analysis and data-driven approaches to track shifts in various dimensions of organisational culture over time. The study concludes that targeted efforts on culture elements can lead to corresponding improvements in many areas including those not targeted, emphasising the interconnectedness of Agile culture elements.

Abstract Agile organizations have to deal regularly with change and at the same time adapt to sustain agility. In this paper, we present an initial study to identify factors considered when changes need to be made to sustain agility. We used a novel data collection approach, critical decision method (CDM), and investigated three theoretical lenses, paradox theory, situation awareness and shared mental models, to explore the kind of practical consequences they help to uncover. This paper presents the findings of this initial study together with reflections on the data collection method and the three theoretical lenses. Three key dimensions relevant to sustaining agility emerge from the use of these theoretical lenses: teams vs organization; understanding the environment vs the impact of change internally; and understanding “now” vs looking into the future.

Although a stable team is deemed optimal for agile project success, new team members need to join ongoing agile projects. Newcomers must rapidly assimilate into the organisational and project environment while learning how to contribute effectively to the project and integrate into the team without seriously interrupting project progress. This paper addresses how newcomers integrate into an established agile project team and the challenges newcomers and the team face during this process. This paper is a single case study of a co-located agile project team in a large IT department who regularly onboard inexperienced newcomers. We found a mixture of traditional onboarding practices and specific agile practices contribute to the onboarding process. Onboarding challenges include empowerment and mindset change, accommodating part-timers, conveying agile principles, and adjusting to changes in team composition.

Abstract Austerity and financial constraints have been threatening the public sector in the UK for a number of years. Foreseeing the threat of continued budget cuts, and addressing the situation many local councils face, requires internal transformations for financial stability without losing the key focus on public service. Agile transformations have been undertaken by organisations wanting to learn from the software development community and bringing agile principles into the wider organisation. This paper describes and analyses an ongoing behaviour-led transformation in a district council in the UK. It presents the results of the analysis of 19 interviews with internal stakeholders at the council, of observations of meetings among senior and middle management in a five-month period. The paper explores the successes and the challenges encountered towards the end of the transformation process and reflects on balancing acts to address the challenges, between: disruption and business as usual, empowerment and goal setting, autonomy and processes and procedures, and behaviours and skills. Based on our findings, we suggest that behaviours on their own cannot guarantee a sustained agile culture, and that this is equally important for enterprise agility and for large-scale agile software development transformations.

Agile approaches are adopted in industry to improve outcomes from software development, and are increasingly the subject of research studies. However, adoption is not the end of the story. Agile requires on-going change and commitment in order to become sustainable and embedded within teams and organisations. This study explores current perceptions of post-adoptive agility. We asked 50 practitioners 'what does agile sustainability mean to you?'. Analysis of practitioner comments identified four themes: being completely agile, independent, focused on business value and need, and consistent across time. Post-adoptive agile is an under-researched area, there is inconsistent use of terminology, and there is a gap between practitioners' and researchers' perceptions about what is important for sustaining agile.

Knowledge is a core resource for agile organisations that is transformed into products and services during the development process. Sharing of knowledge is essential across any organisation, and it has been claimed that the software industry requires more knowledge management than any other sector. Agile methodologies concentrate on team level collaboration, and some techniques for inter-team knowledge sharing have also proved to be successful. But these techniques focus on within-team and between-team knowledge sharing rather than knowledge sharing across the organisation. This paper presents the results of a survey with 81 responses on organisational knowledge sharing in a multinational agile company. The survey focuses on three aspects of knowledge sharing: within agile teams, beyond the team with company colleagues, and with customers. It concentrates on knowledge sharing practices, ease of knowledge sharing and motivation for knowledge sharing. Summary statistics, regression, and test of equity are used as analysis techniques. Results show that knowledge sharing with team members is significantly easier than with customers or company colleagues beyond their team. In addition, using agile practices improves ease of knowledge sharing within teams but not with customers or colleagues. Extrinsic motivators need to be in place to encourage knowledge sharing across the organisation, especially where such knowledge sharing is not an automatic consequence of completing the work.

Background: Most companies practicing Agile are not fully Agile but instead they combine both Agile and traditional practices in their operations. It is not clear how these practices can be successfully used together in an organisation. Aims: We investigate practitioners' mitigation strategies related to the challenge of doing Agile in a non-Agile environment. Method: Strategies were collected during two studies, an online survey and an interactive workshop run at an Agile meetup and analysed thematically. Results: Strategies related to the wider organisation and not just software development. Two perspectives emerged from the data: an organisational and a change perspective. Five organisational themes were identified with Management and decision-making and Culture the two biggest themes. Nine change themes were identified, with Being open, Using specific approaches and Educating the biggest themes. Conclusions: Better understanding is needed of how Agile practitioners can accomplish bottom-up change in their organisation.

Theoretical computer science is a difficult subject in the computer science curriculum. Innovations in teaching and new pedagogic practices have been developing in the last decade but are still far from being widely applied to computer science We propose that the teaching of more challenging areas of computer science can benefit from opportunities created by a blended approach of face-to-face with online teaching and individual and group activities. We present the design of a Design and Analysis of Algorithms including innovations in pedagogy, as flipped classroom, problem-based lectures and social learning.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) have provided new perspectives for the construction, access and sharing of knowledge. While OERs can bring benefits to, and impact on education, there are still challenges to their widespread production and use. One of the challenges faced by developers (including educators and practitioners) of OERs has been how to produce quality and relevant learning materials, capable of being reused and adapted in different learning situations. In our work we propose and define an agile learning design method to support the design and creation of OERs. It is based on agile practices from software engineering and on practices of learning design from the OULDI project at the UK Open University. We illustrate our ideas with an experiment that validates the proposed method through its application in the design and creation of an OER in the software testing domain. The results obtained so far have shown that the method is feasible and effective for the design and creation of OERs.

The Open University is a distance-based higher education institution. Most of our students are in employment and study from home, contacting their tutor and fellow students via e-mail and discussion forums. In this paper, we describe our undergraduate and postgraduate modules in the software systems area, how we teach them at a distance, and our focus on shifting our students' minds into a reflective, critical, holistic socio-technical view of software systems that is relevant to their particular professional contexts.

This paper presents a customization of a learning design approach, OULDI, to designing and implementing Software Engineering courses. We propose an iterative process for the application of the OULDI views. This process starts with a course map view and follows a series of steps that ends with the evaluation of the design reflecting on the balance of the proposed activities. A case study is presented in which two institutions were involved in the design and implementation of an experimental software engineering course. Feedback from students, designers and lecturers was collected to support the validation of the design and implementation of the course. This showed that learning design, with the process proposed here, is a feasible approach for the design of software engineering courses.

The paper addresses the problem of engaging part-time PhD students studying at a distance in a community of students. It reports on a longitudinal survey of part-time Computing PhD students' use of digital technologies to support them in engaging in formal and informal doctoral dialogues, documenting and reflecting on their research, engaging with the community, and keeping themselves informed. It considers `what works' in students' deployment of technologies and highlights both changes in use and persistent phenomena.

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners to present contributions and discuss strategies for distance learning software engineering postgraduate education.

This paper reports on the design of a Second Life campus for a new innovative post-graduate research programme at the Open University, UK, a world leader in supported distance higher education. The programme, launched in October 2009, is a part-time Master of Philosophy (MPhil) to be delivered at a distance, supported by a blend of synchronous and asynchronous Internet technologies. This paper briefly discusses the pedagogical thinking behind the Second Life campus, and the way the implementation was designed to meet the pedagogy. The paper also reports on the outcome of an early evaluation we have conducted.

Evolving business needs call for customizable choreographed interactions. However, choreography descriptions do not capture the problem-domain knowledge required to perform the customization effectively. Hence, we propose performing the customization to models of organizational requirements motivating the interaction. To facilitate the derivation of the resulting choreography description, we propose an alignment between conversations and organizational dependencies. We employ the domain knowledge and formal semantics of requirements models to find customization alternatives and reason about them. Using the alignment, we derive constraints on conversations systematically from customized requirements models.

Abstract This paper proposes an enterprise framework for workflow management (WFM) systems based on the Workflow Management Coalition generic architecture. In addition, it presents one smaller object‐oriented framework for task scheduling. This framework is obtained by refining one of the packages of the overall framework. The task scheduling framework was designed following the concept of model framework as in Catalysis. This sort of framework can be used as a template to generate code components within an application domain. According to this approach we can develop WFM components that can interoperate within a well‐defined enterprise framework. This paper also presents the process of developing interoperable code components from model frameworks. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We are now starting to see the first applications of formal methods to the development of safety-critical computer based systems. Discussion on what are appropriate methods and tools is still intense, and there is no standard approach that presents a complete solution for the formal development of such systems. Some of the protagonists claim that formal methods offer a complete solution to the problems of safety-critical software development. Others claim that formal methods are of little or no use – or at least that their utility is severely limited by the cost of applying the techniques. The aim of this paper is to try to cast some light on this debate and to discuss from a technico-philosophical viewpoint the benefits and limitations of formal methods in this context.