Influence of Software Product Management Maturity on Usage of Artefacts in Agile Software Development

Abstract

Context: Agile software development (ASD) uses 'agile' artefacts such as user stories and product backlogs as well as 'non-agile' artefacts, for instance designs and test plans. Rationales for incorporating especially non-agile artefacts by an agile team mainly remain unknown territory. Goal: We start off to explore influences on artefacts usage, and state our research question as: To what extent does maturity relate to the usage of artefacts in ASD in software product organizations? Method: In our multiple case study 14 software product organizations were visited where software product management maturity was rated and their artefacts usage listed. Results: We found maturity to be negatively correlated with the non-agile/all artefacts ratio. In other words, the more mature software product management is, the fewer non-agile artefacts are used in ASD. Conclusions: This suggests that an organizational factor influences an agile team in its artefacts usage, contradictory to the concept of self-organizing agile teams.

Working software over comprehensive documentation – Rationales of agile teams for artefacts usage

“…Recent studies on artefacts usage in ASD shows that agile developers use quite a number of artefacts (Bass 2016;Gröber 2013;Liskin 2015;Wagenaar et al 2015;Wagenaar et al 2017). Some of them are inherent to an ASD method, for instance, user story or backlog, but others are not, recalling bygone memories from a Waterfall era, that advocated program design first and documenting it thoroughly, using, for instance, a design and a test document (Royce 1970).…”