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A dependency taxonomy for agile software development projects

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Abstract

Agile software development is designed to achieve collaborative software development. A supporting pillar of collaboration is effective coordination, which is necessary to manage dependencies in projects. Understanding the dependencies arising in agile software development projects can help practitioners choose appropriate coordinative practices from the large number of practices provided by the various agile methods. To achieve this understanding, this article analyses dependencies in three typical cases of co-located agile software development and presents the dependencies as a taxonomy with decision rules for allocating dependencies into categories. Findings show that knowledge, process, and resource dependencies are present, with knowledge dependencies predominant. In addition, there are agile practices with a coordinative function that address multiple dependencies in these agile software development projects. These practices would be a good choice for coordinating a project and supporting collaboration in agile software projects.

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Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the research participants for informing this research with their experiences and the anonymous reviewers for improving the article with their insightful advice.

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  1. Faculty of Business and Information Technology, Whitireia Polytechnic, Wi Neera Drive, Private Bag 50910, Porirua City, 5240, New Zealand

    Diane E. Strode

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Appendix

Appendix

The interview schedule for an individual project team member.

Notes:

  • If participants choose to be interviewed in pairs or small groups that is acceptable.

  • If questions arise in this schedule that participants have addressed in previous responses then omit the question

  1. 1.

    Background questions

    • Name

    • Job title

    • Years of IT experience

    • Educational background

    • Describe your job (what is your role) and its goals

  2. 2.

    What are your main work activities (3–5) IN THIS PROJECT

    • For each activity (this will depend on specialisation/generalisation of work)

      • Main purpose of these activities – each one?

    • Depending if work is broken down into distinct activities or not…

      • How is work assigned to you?

      • How do you know when to start the work/activity?

      • Who do you work with to complete the activity [for stakeholder identification]

        • Who do you send communications to?

        • Who do you receive communications from?

      • How do you share out/or delegate the work

      • How do you decide who to share out or delegate the work to

      • What resources (things or information) do you need to complete the activity

      • What technologies do you use to help you carry out the activity? (Email, config man. tools, wiki, project database, on-line project plan, on-line specifications…)

      • What forms or documents do you need to perform the activity? Examples?

      • What is the product or partial product of the activity? (documents, information, software)

        • Who relies on the product of this activity?

      • Do any of your work products need to be integrated or fit in with other peoples work or applications?

        • Who waits for your work to be completed? Example?

    • Individual activities:

      • How do you know when the activity is complete?

      • How do others know when the activity is complete?

      • What things hinder this activity

        • What do you wait for?

        • Negotiate for?

        • Bid for?

      • What would happen if this activity was not carried out?

      • What alternative ways could the outputs or goal of this activity be achieved?

  3. 3.

    Dependency prompts:

    • Vendor [stakeholder identification]

    • Customer [stakeholder identification]

    • Other business units [stakeholder identification]

    • Lifecycle (only when multiple teams are working on same product for different platforms) – how is this managed/organised?

    • Big picture - how do you achieve an overview of how all of the parts of the system fit together?

    • Testing – test versions - how do you manage/organise this? What types of testing do you do?

    • Parallel development – when two or more people work on the same code module – how do you manage/organise this?

    • Change – when changes are made how does this impact other code modules, documentation, testing

    • Expertise – shared product knowledge

      • How do you all know what the product must do?

      • How do you know what the other people on the team are doing on a daily basis within the code?

      • How do you know what the other people on the team are doing on a daily basis within the documentation?

      • How do you know what the other people on the team are doing on a daily basis within the test bank?

      • How do you come to know what the skills and capabilities of the other team members are – how do you know who to ask about things?

    • Historical understanding – how do you find out about previous decisions made that impact

      • The code?

      • This project?

    • Integration – how do you integrate the code and other components

      • Regularly, randomly, at the end? To a schedule?

    • What is the main source of bugs in the system?

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Strode, D.E. A dependency taxonomy for agile software development projects. Inf Syst Front 18, 23–46 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-015-9574-1

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