Abstract
Agile software development projects rely on the diversity of team members’ expertise. It is vital to develop the meta-knowledge of the available expertise in Agile teams. However, locating the internal expertise in Agile teams is not explicitly reported in the literature. Through a Grounded Theory study involving 16 Agile practitioners based in New Zealand and Australia, we revealed four ways to identify internal expertise in Agile software development projects: communicating frequently, working closely together, declaring self-identified expertise, and using an expertise directory. The outcome of this study will provide significant insight into how Agile team members depend on each other in locating their peers’ expertise, as well as quantify the level of expertise.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allan, G.: A critique of using grounded theory as a research method. Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods 2(1), 1–10 (2003)
Bertoni, M., Chirumalla, K.: Leveraging web 2.0 in new product development: Lessons learned from a cross-company study. J. UCS 17(4), 548–564 (2011)
Bielaczyc, K., Collins, A.: Learning communities in classrooms: A reconceptualization of educational practice. In: Instructional-design Theories and Models: A New Paradigm of Instructional Theory vol. 2, pp. 269–292 (1999)
Charmaz, K.: Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. Sage Publications Limited (2006)
Corbin, J.M., Strauss, A.: Grounded theory research: Procedures, canons, and evaluative criteria. Qualitative Sociology 13(1), 3–21 (1990)
Dessai, K., Kamat, M.: Application of social media for tracking knowledge in agile software projects. Available at SSRN 2018845 (2012)
Ehrlich, K., Chang, K.: Leveraging expertise in global software teams: Going outside boundaries. In: International Conference on Global Software Engineering, ICGSE 2006, pp. 149–158. IEEE (2006)
Faraj, S., Sproull, L.: Coordinating expertise in software development teams. Management Science, 1554–1568 (2000)
Garrett, S.K., Caldwell, B.S., Collins, S.T.: Supporting expertise coordination in multidisciplinary project teams. In: Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, vol. 53, pp. 1008–1012. SAGE Publications (2009)
Glaser, B.G.: Emergence vs forcing: Basics of grounded theory analysis. Sociology Press (1992)
Glaser, B.G., Strauss, A.L.: The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine de Gruyter (1967)
Hoda, R.: Self-organizing agile teams: A grounded theory. Phd Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington (2011)
Lee, G., Xia, W.: Toward agile: An integrated analysis of quantitative and qualitative field data on software development agility. Mis Quarterly 34(1) (2010)
Littlepage, G., Robison, W., Reddington, K.: Effects of task experience and group experience on group performance, member ability, and recognition of expertise. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 69(2), 133–147 (1997)
Mockus, A., Herbsleb, J.: Expertise browser: a quantitative approach to identifying expertise. In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 503–512. ACM (2002)
Ryan, S., O’Connor, R.V.: Social interaction, team tacit knowledge and transactive memory: empirical support for the agile approach
Santos, V.A., Goldman, A., Santos, C.D.: Uncovering steady advances for an extreme programming course, vol. 15, p. 2, Centro Latinoamericano de Estudios en Informtica (2012)
Sarma, A., Van der Hoek, A., Redmiles, D.: The coordination pyramid: A perspective on the state of the art in coordination technology
Shim, J., Sheu, T., Chen, H., Jiang, J., Klein, G.: Coproduction in successful software development projects. Information and Software Technology 52(10), 1062–1068 (2010)
Strode, D.E., Huff, S.L.: A taxonomy of dependencies in agile software development. In: ACIS 2012: Location, Location, Location: Proceedings of the 23rd Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2012, pp. 1–10 (2012)
Vanhanen, J., Korpi, H.: Experiences of using pair programming in an agile project. In: 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2007, p. 274b. IEEE (2007)
Wegner, D.M.: A computer network model of human transactive memory. Social Cognition 13(3), 319–339 (1995)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rejab, M.M., Noble, J., Allan, G. (2014). Locating Expertise in Agile Software Development Projects. In: Cantone, G., Marchesi, M. (eds) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. XP 2014. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 179. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06862-6_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06862-6_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06861-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-06862-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)