THE POSITIVE IMPACT OF AGILE RETROSPECTIVES ON THE COLLABORATION OF DISTRIBUTED DEVELOPMENT TEAMS – A PRACTICAL APPROACH ON THE EXAMPLE OF BOSCH ENGINEERING GMBH

To counteract competitive pressure, increasing customer requirements and growing product complexity successful distributed collaboration in product development is vital. Companies have to face new challenges, such as efficiency losses in communication. To overcome these challenges agile working practices, such as agile retrospectives, could be beneficial. The objective of this scientific work is to evaluate the benefit of agile working practices on the example of agile retrospectives, for the improvement of collaboration in distributed development teams. Based on literature analysis, qualitative and quantitative expert interviews following the DRM by Blessing and Chakrabarti, this scientific work shows that agile working practices have a high potential to improve distributed collaboration. To address this potential, several virtual agile retrospectives are developed and conducted within a distributed team at Bosch Engineering GmbH. The evaluation of this approach results in a high potential of agile retrospectives indicating an improvement tendency. Especially iteratively implemented virtual agile retrospectives have a positive impact on successful distributed collaboration.

Managing Contradictory Tensions in Agile Distributed Development

Increasingly, agile approaches are being followed in a distributed setup to develop software. An agile approach is characterised by the need to regularly welcome change requests and update the software artefact accordingly whereas distributed teams prefer to work towards following a plan to fulfil project objectives defined upfront. This results in contradictory tensions when agile is practised with teams operating in a globally distributed format. This chapter focuses on exploring the central conflict and discuss approaches to manage the conflicting forces in an agile distributed development setup. Furthermore, it presents an industry case study to provide more clarity on conflict management in such settings.

Addressing Security Requirements through Onshore Agile Development When Packaging Software in the Distributed Development Domain: An empirical study

Designing software for use by multiple clients has become commonplace in the software sector and has led to many vendors focusing on developing software for a specific sector, marketing the product then modifying it to a customer’s requirements. To fit the software to the client’s needs involves a unique form of teamwork, and it is usually an offshore team that processes the requests and implements the changes to the initial infrastructure. Unfortunately, this contravenes organizations’ information security requirements, due to their multiple structures and infrastructures and their need for privacy as well as swift processing of requests at reasonable cost. This study proposes a hybrid model, the Onshore Agile Security Requirements Development (OASRD) model, which uses Agile to meet the security implications arising from the onshore team working at the client’s site while it processes the customization requirements. It investigates the impact of the model on productivity, measured by the number of security and customization requirements that are processed and the estimated cost in terms of human resources. The evaluation reveals a statistically significant increase in productivity of about 40%, accompanied by a reduction in cost of more than 48% over the entire customization process, demonstrating the advantages of customizing packaged software through distributed development.

COVID-19 Disease Map, a computational knowledge repository of SARS-CoV-2 virus-host interaction mechanisms

We hereby describe a large-scale community effort to build an open-access, interoperable, and computable repository of COVID-19 molecular mechanisms - the COVID-19 Disease Map. We discuss the tools, platforms, and guidelines necessary for the distributed development of its contents by a multi-faceted community of biocurators, domain experts, bioinformaticians, and computational biologists. We highlight the role of relevant databases and text mining approaches in enrichment and validation of the curated mechanisms. We describe the contents of the map and their relevance to the molecular pathophysiology of COVID-19 and the analytical and computational modelling approaches that can be applied to the contents of the COVID-19 Disease Map for mechanistic data interpretation and predictions. We conclude by demonstrating concrete applications of our work through several use cases.

SIMULATION OF GRADIENT-BASED INDIVIDUAL DESIGN BEHAVIOUR IN DISTRIBUTED DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES

As current vehicle development processes in the automotive industry are highly distributed, the interaction between design teams is limited. In this paper we use a simulation in order to investigate how the rate of design team interaction affects the solution quality and development cost. Results show, that in case of no limiting constraints, a low rate of interaction yields the best results regarding solution quality and development cost. If design activities are affected by constraints, however, the rate of interaction is subject to a conflict between solution quality and development cost.