Exploring Performance Assurance Practices and Challenges in Agile Software Development: An Ethnographic Study

Background Agile principles play a pivotal role in modern software development. Unfortunately, the assessment of non-functional software properties, such as performance, can be challenging in Agile Software Development (ASD). Agile mentality tends to favor functional development over non-functional quality assurance. Additionally, frequent code changes and software releases make impractical the use of classical performance assurance approaches. Objective This paper investigates the current practices, problems and challenges of performance assurance in a real context of ASD. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study that specifically investigate performance assurance in ASD daily work. Method Through a 6-months industry collaboration with a large software organization that adopts ASD, we investigated practical and management problems in handling performance assurance activities. The research was conducted in line with ethnographic research, which guided towards building knowledge from participatory observations, unstructured interviews and reviews of documentations. Results The study shows that the case organization still relies on a waterfall-like approach for performance assurance. Such an approach showed to be inadequate for ASD, thereby leading to a sub-optimal management of performance assessment activities. We distilled three key challenges when trying to improve the performance assurance process: (i) managing performance assessment activities, (ii) continuous performance assessment and (iii) defining the performance assessment effort. Conclusions The assessment of software performance in the context of ASD is still far from being flawless. The lack of guidelines and well-established practices induces the adoption of approaches that can be obsolete and inadequate for ASD. Further research is needed to improve the performance management in this context, and to enable effective continuous performance assessment.