Investment in information technology is associated with better business performance when its implementation is successful, but it has high costs in case of failure, especially for large software development projects, which typically have the highest failure rates. Agile methodologies emerged with the expectation of reducing the risk of software development project failure. This research aims to answer the following question: What are the human-related critical success factors for agile software development projects to succeed? The research model comprises four explanatory variables (team capability, customer involvement, psychological safety, and team autonomy) and one dependent variable (success of agile software development projects). A questionnaire-based survey was carried out, resulting in 177 valid responses. A Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis was performed to test the theoretical model. The findings indicate that team capability and customer involvement have the strongest effects on the success of agile software development projects. The results also show that psychological safety is a significant indirect success factor and that team autonomy appears to have a competing dynamic with psychological safety on the other two factors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the direct impact of psychological safety and its indirect effect, mediated by team capability and customer involvement, on the success of agile software development projects. The mediation, moderation, and direct effects are studied, offering theoretical and practical insights.

The transition to the production phase of electronic products requires the product design to follow a large set of constraints that ensure that the electronic product will materialize into a viable product. The printed circuit board (PCB) design is a central part of electronic products and therefore is the part where most constraints are enforced. Although PCB designers already address design constraints with the help of Electrical Computer Aided Design (ECAD) tools that can verify product design rules in an automated manner, there are still many product design rules that are left out of the ECAD tools verification engines, in particular the design rules related to PCB manufacturing and assembly. These rules are many times verified by human visual inspection. This fact increases the risk of running into design errors, leading to increased costs during production phase. This paper proposes a rule ontology representing the large range of constraints imposed by the production phase of electronics products. The rule-based ontology is implemented using a Visual Programming Language (VPL) that facilitates the encoding of the knowledge provided by electronics products manufacturing experts. A practical example is also presented, describing a PCB manufacturing rule and its graphical representation.

The design of a printed circuit board (PCB) is an example of the variety of technologies that have to be combined in a single physical output. Thus the need for collaboration between engineering teams, each of which with their own expertise (e.g. electrical, mechanical, testing and manufacturing) is of paramount importance. This imposes the need to share the electrical design and the PCB layout among different expertise teams that participate in a common electronic product development. The effective collaboration between the various teams can bring tremendous gains during the development phase as well as during the production phase, by increasing product performance and avoiding production issues. However these teams often face the problem that each of these teams are using different tools that do not enable sharing PCB layout data. An overview of the advances in this field is presented in this paper. In the context of a real electronic product manufacturer, this paper presents the PCB data exchange requirements and the analysis of how existing Electronic Computer-Aided Design (ECAD) file formats meet those same requirements. A reflection is made about the challenges that latest developments face. Lastly, future research perspectives are drawn.

In this paper, we present a two-step approach for modelling controlled flexibility in software processes: (1) senior process engineers express which, where and how changes can be applied onto process elements, (2) other process participants can easily identify which changes they are allowed to perform, and act accordingly. To support this, we propose a flexibility meta-model and modelling language, and a software process modelling tool called FlexEPFC. Finally, we compare FlexEPFC with three other prominent process-aware tools: SPADE, JIL/Juliette and Jazz.