Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Our primary data collection approaches were interviews, detailed inspection and
analysis of project documentation, onsite demonstrations of software and informal
conversations face-to-face and email-based communication with key project staff and
some customers. Instead of interviewing several people for a shorter duration, we
decided to do in-depth interviews with one representative from each side (i.e., project
manager and an actively involved customer). We carried out semi-structured inter-
views; each interview lasted about two hours. We provided the interviewees with a
brief research outline before the interview session. We asked our respondents about
the facts of the matter, as well as gaining their opinions about the events that oc-
curred. We had already inspected the project artefacts, such as documentation, before
the interviews. The documents made available to the research team included system
specifications, project plans, testing scripts and the completed software. Documentary
information was also used to corroborate and augment evidence found from the inter-
views and discussions that focussed in the use of agile practices to reduce coordina-
tion risks. A qualitative content analysis technique was used to extract the agile
practices that reduced coordination risks from the interview data.
Data analysis was
done by the key author who coded both interviews, and developed separate codes for
addressing each of the practices that reduce GSD coordination risks. Our data analysis
aim was to identify, describe and make sense of how agile practices were used to
reduce GSD risks that impact coordination processes. To improve the quality of our
interpretation, we reported our initial findings back to both the customer and project
manager. Both then provided feedback that identified any omissions and rectified
misunderstandings in our analysis.
4.1 Project Description
This section describes the case study project. The organization, individuals and prod-
uct developed are referred to by fictitious names in order to maintain the anonymity
of the organizations concerned. “Alpha” is
an Australian-based software development
company that develops a range of software products using agile software development
methodologies. For some time the company has had developers in Australia and Ma-
laysia. The project we investigated is “Alpha-Global”. It is a service-based graphical
software engineering tool to be used commercially with external customers and it was
developed by a distributed team. The project was relatively stable as regards to re-
quirements changes although there were a several initial changes due to very complex
graphical requirements.
4.2 Team Description
The project had a team that was distributed to two countries, Australia and Malaysia.
The customer was based in Australia and was actively involved in the development.
The project manager was also based in Sydney. The Sydney part of the team consisted
of two full time developers and one part time test engineer. The Malaysian operation
involved around 25 developers with one local development lead. The number of in-
volved developers in the Malaysian site varied during the course of the project and
usually 3-5 developers were involved throughout the development life cycle. The
engagement of the Malaysian developers varied. They were mostly involved in back
