This study examines changing team cognition and cognitive artifact use as agile software development iterations progress to better understand team member interactions. The four case studies conducted observed the distributed cognition on the team changing from planning, managing, developing, and concluding tasks in iterations to deliver working functionality. Cognitive artifacts used throughout the iteration also changed. This study provides a clearer understanding of how and when team cognition and artifact use change as agile software development teams use artifacts to manage projects. Interactions between team members and artifacts move from individual to social interactions as the iteration progresses with frequent, short, continuous communication and interactions.

Against the backdrop of the growing adoption of Kanban in a variety of software development domains, this paper reports on how a Systems Thinking approach was used to implement Kanban within a business unit of a government organization. Based on an in‐depth case study in the development organization, we describe how Kanban practices such as visualization, manage flow, classes of service, and board design were implemented. Stages in the double diamond design thinking process of exploring an issue more widely (divergent thinking) and then taking focused action (convergent thinking) were incorporated to adapt Kanban practices such as board design. Positive experiences included improved visibility, improved collaboration, and improvements in lead time. Challenges included lack of team buy‐in, setting work‐in‐progress limits, and short‐term Kanban coach. We present the key lessons learned and offer practical recommendations on how teams can better produce knowledge work in today's fast‐paced dynamic business environment.

This completed action research utilizes the conceptual framework of quantum mechanics in action science field studies for bias-free behavioral data collection and quantification. The research question tied to experimental verification if action research field studies can practically utilize the theory of communicative action and the theory of quantum mechanics to contextualize the quantification with pathological and distorted behavioral pattern. The result is a quantum-like formalism that provides intermediary conceptuality for organizational intervening initiatives. This process of contextualization behavior in projects via quantum probability experimentally evidenced. The chapter concludes by reviewing the results of two experiments that the hypotheses that the theory of quantum mechanics and the theory of communicative action qualifies as a building block for a planned methodological approach to intervene and steer problematic social structures in the desired direction.

Although agile software development is often associated with improved decision making, existing studies tend to focus on narrow aspects of decision making in such environments. There is a lack of clarity on how teams make and evaluate a myriad of decisions from software feature inception to product delivery and refinement. Indeed there is relatively little known about a) the decision characteristics related to agile values, and b) the challenges they present for decision making on agile teams. We present an in-depth exploratory case study based on a pluralistic approach comprising semi-structured interviews, focus groups, team meeting observations, and document analysis. The study identifies failings of decision making in an agile setting. Explicitly considering the decision process, information intelligence used in decision making, and decision quality, the key contribution of this paper is the development of an overarching framework of agile decision making, which identifies particular decision characteristics across 4 key agile values and the related challenges for agile team decision making. It provides a framework for researchers and practitioners to evaluate the decision challenges of an agile software development team and to improve decision quality. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Decision making in organizations predominantly focuses on choosing the best option between two or more alternative options. Much decision research does not specifically discuss communication, although organizational communication and group communication implications are inherent in these theories. Understanding the decision processes and heuristics helps individuals make better quality decisions. Research in this area spans a variety of disciplines and focuses on five main areas: decision process theories, group decision making, decision heuristics, cognitive biases, and decision quality. This entry describes these five areas in more detail, examines existing gaps in the decision making research, and provides recommendations for future research.

People often mimic each other. Research has examined the positive social benefits of mimicry and factors that lead to increased mimicry. Two studies examine whether a participant is more likely to mimic nonverbal behavior of someone who shares the same opinion as the participant than someone who does not. The participant made a decision between two vacation destinations and discussed the choice in a three-person group. The two other group members were confederates. One agreed with the participant’s choice and one disagreed. Each confederate emitted a different nonverbal behavior consistently throughout discussion. Results offer some support to the hypothesis that the participant would be more likely to mimic nonverbal behavior of the confederate who is in agreement with the participant.

This paper refines a model of Sustained Agile Usage to present a comprehensive understanding of the key factors that are pertinent to the sustained usage of agile methodologies. It describes our qualitative study which involves: (i) a focus group with twenty-nine software industry agile practitioners, and (ii) semi-structured interviews with twenty agile practitioners from five different organizational backgrounds. Data from both methods is used to develop the refined model of Sustained Agile Usage. The refined Sustained Agile Usage Model includes the following three categories: Agile Team Factors, Technological Factors, and Organizational Factors. These revisions are discussed in this research. Finally, we see implications for research: the study offers a useful complement to the few studies that have examined the long-term acceptance of agile methods. The refined model can be used as a reference model to guide future studies to understand sustained usage in different agile domains (e.g. Kanban). Additionally, implications for practice include valuable insights that can help agile teams and others (e.g. top management) to better understand and benchmark how agile methods can be effectively sustained in organizations. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Context: While project management success factors have long been established via the golden triangle, little is known about how project iteration objectives and critical decisions relate to these success factors. It seems logical that teams' iteration objectives would reflect project management success factors, but this may not always be the case. If not, how are teams' objectives for iterations differing from the golden triangle of project management success factors?Objective: This study identifies iteration objectives and the critical decisions that relate to the golden triangle of project management success factors in agile software development teams working in two-week iterations.Method: The author conducted semi-structured interviews with members across three different agile software development teams using a hybrid of XP and Scrum agile methodologies. Iteration Planning and Retrospective meetings were also observed. Interview data was transcribed, coded and reviewed by the researcher and two independently trained research assistants. Data analysis involved organizing the data to identify iteration objectives and critical decisions to identify whether they relate to project management success factors.Results: Agile teams discussed four categories of iteration objectives: Functionality, Schedule, Quality and Team Satisfaction. Two of these objectives map directly to two aspects of the golden triangle: schedule and quality. The agile teams' critical decisions were also examined to understand the types of decisions the teams would have made differently to ensure success, which resulted in four categories of such decisions: Quality, Dividing Work, Iteration Amendments and Team Satisfaction.Conclusion: This research has contributed to the software development and project management literature by examining iteration objectives on agile teams and how they relate to the golden triangle of project management success factors to see whether these teams incorporate the golden triangle factors in their objectives and whether they include additional objectives in their iterations. What's more, this research identified four critical decisions related to the golden triangle. These findings provide important insight to the continuing effort to better assess project management success, particularly for agile teams. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper first explores the decision-making process in agile teams using scrum practices and second identifies factors that influence the decision-making process during the Sprint Planning and Daily Scrum Meetings. We conducted 34 semi-structured interviews and 18 observations across four agile teams. Our findings show that a rational decision-making process is sometimes followed in the Sprint Planning and Daily Scrum Meetings and that three factors can influence the rational decision-making process: sprint duration, experience and resource availability. Additionally, decisions are not always made in a collaborative manner by team members. This research contributes to the decision-making literature and project management literature by highlighting difficulties pertinent to decision making in agile teams.

Agile methodologies (AM), which emphasize iterative and incremental development with just-in-time processes and documentation, have been adopted by an increasing number of organisations. Despite this progress there is lack of clarity on their effective use after initial adoption. While there is much research on the use of various agile methods and practices, there is very limited understanding on the critical factors that impact their continued and effective usage. To address this gap, an integrated model called the Agile Usage Model (AUM) was developed, by coalescing insights from organisational level Information Systems implementation, traditional innovation diffusion models, and post-adoptive agile usage. The objective of this study is to use multiple data collection methods to further evaluate and refine the AUM. The final refined conceptual model of Agile Usage is presented along with implications for research and practice.

This article examines whether participation in a business communication simulation significantly influences students' perceptions of their business communication behaviors. Results revealed several significant differences between students' pre-and post scores. Students reported significantly higher post scores in 4 of 5 of the examined categories, including message construction, message delivery, critical analysis, and collaboration. These findings suggest that participation in the simulation positively impacts students' estimations of their business communication competencies. Possible explanations and implications behind these findings are discussed. Future research directions are proposed.

This research examines students' reactions to a contemporary simulation infused in the business communication curriculum. Results show that students indicated the experience helped them learn how to work better as a team, how to maintain composure, how the business world works, and how to improve their communication. Students also verified the validity of the simulation, stating that it prepared them for the business world by providing them with a challenging yet positive experience to demonstrate learned business communication principles. Details about the pedagogical framework of the business communication simulation and possible explanations and implications behind the findings are discussed.

The obstacles facing decision making in Agile development are critical yet poorly understood. This research examines decisions made across four stages of the iteration cycle: Iteration Planning, Iteration Execution, Iteration Review and Iteration Retrospective. A mixed method approach was employed, whereby a focus group was initially conducted with 43 Agile developers and managers to determine decisions made at different points of the iteration cycle. Subsequently, six illustrative mini cases were purposefully conducted as examples of the six obstacles identified in these focus groups. This included interviews with 18 individuals in Agile projects from five different organizations: a global consulting organization, a multinational communications company, two multinational software development companies, and a large museum organization. This research contributes to Agile software development literature by analyzing decisions made during the iteration cycle and identifying six key obstacles to these decisions. Results indicate the six decision obstacles are unwillingness to commit to decisions; conflicting priorities; unstable resource availability; and lack of: implementation; ownership; empowerment. These six decision obstacles are mapped to descriptive decision making principles to demonstrate where the obstacles affect the decision process. The effects of these obstacles include a lack of longer-term, strategic focus for decisions, an ever-growing backlog of delayed work from previous iterations, and a lack of team engagement. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

While there are many purported benefits of agile software development, use of these methods often has a significant impact on project coordination and information management, particularly where large, distributed teams are concerned. Effective coordination requires easily accessible, preferably structured information that is typically unavailable. In this paper we present a comprehensive argument for the need to develop supporting tools for extracting information in agile projects. Such tools may improve the coordination, information management and tracking processes in agile teams with automated highlighting of salient issues arising from project meetings using documentation generated automatically from unstructured information, such as Instant Messaging (IM) history or transcribed audio records of team meetings. We discuss the relevance of our methodology for large-scale, distributed, multi-project agile teams and present guidelines for designing information systems to support such tasks. We present a description and evaluation of the proposed information extraction method using an actual dataset.

The process and effectiveness of decision making in agile development is critical yet poorly understood. This research examines decisions made across the four stages of the sprint cycle: Sprint Planning, Sprint Execution, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective. A focus group was conducted with 43 agile developers and managers to determine what decisions were made at different points of the sprint cycle. The results indicate that Sprint Planning includes decisions about planning the work for the subsequent sprint, Sprint Execution includes tactical implementation and development decisions, Sprint Review includes decisions about whether the product satisfies the customer and whether future sprints should continue, and Sprint Retrospective includes decisions for improving the sprint process in future sprints. Additionally, six key obstacles to decision making were identified. This research contributes to the literature on agile software development by advancing our understanding of how these teams function by analyzing the decisions made during different points of the sprint cycle and the obstacles to these decisions.

This paper explores how experience drives certain project management decisions on agile software development teams. Using naturalistic decision-making (NDM) theory, the paper identifies: decisions made by an agile team, experiential influence in their resolution, and decisions escalated to a higher authority. Using an agile software development case study, 18 interviews and 21 meeting observations were conducted. Results indicate the team made most planning and technical decisions, relying on experience for planning decisions but developing creative solutions for technical decisions requiring novel courses of action. Decisions were escalated when the team could not resolve them (e.g. dependencies and resourcing decisions). The team studied used two NDM decision methods: recognition-primed and creative methods. Many planning decisions used the recognition-primed method as these decisions relied on memories of previous similar situations and decisions, adding to existing research on experience driving decisions (2006) but moving beyond a specific type of decision (e.g. design decisions) to understand how experience drives the project management of an agile team.

Changing conditions often require authority figures to develop options for reallocating resources. Based on Prospect Theory, this study predicted that individuals exposed to gain frames or in authority roles would prefer risk-averse options and construct messages expressing desire to avoid risks, whereas those exposed to loss frames or in less powerful roles would prefer risk-taking options and express a desire to take risks. In this experiment, gain frames and being authority figures increased preferences for budget-cutting options with risk-averse options, whereas loss frames and limited authority increased preferences for risk-taking options and the likelihood that individuals advocated creative solutions.