Information needs and presentation in agile software development

Henri Bomström, Markus Kelanti, Elina Annanperä, Kari Liukkunen, Terhi Kilamo, Outi Sievi-Korte, Kari Systä

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

9 Citations (Scopus)
25 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Context: Agile software companies applying the DevOps approach require collaboration and information sharing between practitioners in various roles to produce value. Adopting new development practices affects how practitioners collaborate, requiring companies to form a closer connection between business strategy and software development. However, the types of information management, sales, and development needed to plan, evaluate features, and reconcile their expectations with each other need to be clarified. Objective: To support practitioners in collaborating and realizing changes to their practices, we investigated what information is needed and how it should be represented to support different stakeholders in their tasks. Compared to earlier research, we adopted a holistic approach – by including practitioners throughout the development process – to better understand the information needs from a broader viewpoint. Method: We conducted six workshops and 12 semi-structured interviews at three Finnish small and medium-sized enterprises from different software domains. Thematic analysis was used to identify information-related issues and information and visualization needs for daily tasks. Three themes were constructed as the result of our analysis. Results: Visual information representation catalyzes stakeholder discussion, and supporting information exchange between stakeholder groups is vital for efficient collaboration in software product development. Additionally, user-centric data collection practices are needed to understand how software products are used and to support practitioners’ daily information needs. We also found that a passive way of representing information, such as a dashboard that would disturb practitioners only when attention is needed, was preferred for daily information needs. Conclusion: The software engineering community should consider reviewing the information needs of practitioners from a more holistic view to better understand how tooling support can benefit information exchange between stakeholder groups when making product development decisions and how those tools should be built to accommodate different stakeholder views.

Original languageEnglish
Article number107265
JournalInformation and Software Technology
Volume162
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2023
Publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Funding

The authors thank the company representatives for the time and expertise they provided for the interviews and workshops. The work was supported by the ITEA3 project VISDOM and partly by the ITEA3 project Oxilate. The authors thank Business Finland for the funding. Furthermore, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that helped improve this article.

Keywords

  • Agile software development
  • DevOps
  • Information needs
  • Software engineering
  • Visualization

Publication forum classification

  • Publication forum level 3

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Information Systems
  • Computer Science Applications

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