WDES 2014 paper: On the Identification of Factors that Promote High- Performance Projects in...

On the Identification of Factors that Promote High-Performance

Projects in Distributed Development

Offshore Development Center, ORGChristiano Ayub - IT Development Manager

PUCRS University, BrazilSabrina MarczakMarcelo PerinRafael Prikladnicki

Workshop on DSD, SECO, and SoSSept 28, 2014Maceió, Brazil

J. Iqbal, R. Ahmad, and S. Marczak | EmpiRE workshop

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S. Marczak, R. Prikladnicki, M. Perin, and C. Ayub

DSD Issues3

Miscommunication

Lack of a shared vocabulary

Lack of trust

Coordination difficulties

Lack of unified working processes

J. Iqbal, R. Ahmad, and S. Marczak | EmpiRE workshop

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Expectations

• Projects will attend or exceed their performance goals

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Expectations

• Projects will attend or exceed their performance goals

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High-performance projects


Research question

• What contributes to a distributed software development project to meet or exceed its expected performance?

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Our empirical study

• 1 large multinational organization

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• Brazil

• USA

• India

• Malaysia

• Ireland • Russia


ORG

• Matrix structure

• Development to maintenance projects

• Waterfall model

• CMMI Level 3 but also informal processes

• Annual project roadmap

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Process9

Projects definitionPrioritizationRequests

Business representatives Business analysts managers

Software team

Project developmentClarifications

Business-software reqs

translation

Software reqs analysts Business analysts

Software team

Project manager


Participants

• 11 participants

• 9.5 years @ORG

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Participants’ profile11

P1 Quality and Metrics Manager 12 years, Req Analyst, PM

P2 Career Manager 12 years, 1st BR employeeP3 PM Manager 20 years, American, SalesmanP4 Senior Dev. Manager 10 years, DeveloperP5 Senior Dev. Manager 10 years, Dev, Dev LeaderP6 Senior Dev. Manager 10 years, Dev Leader, ArchitectP7 Project Manager 8 years, Req AnalystP8 Project Manager 10 years, Tester, Test LeaderP9 Project Manager 10 years, Dev, ArchitectP10 Senior Dev. Manager 6 years, PM, Site ManagerP11 Senior Dev. Manager 4 years, PM - critical apps


Interview script

• “Looking back at the distributed software projects you have participated on, please think of one project that stood out and elaborate on what you think that contributed to this project to attend or exceed its performance goals.”

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Findings

• 7 successful factors

• 5 issues or roadblocks

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Factor 1

“introduces something new to the business that helps it to quickly evolve and better attend the market” (P6)

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Enables the business and helps it to evolve

“how can we [IT dept] help ORG to do business in a better way?” (P2)


Factor 2

“try to anticipate the estimated delivery date since the faster the new system is in place the more likely it is that it will be in sync with the current business process” (P9)

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Delivers what the business needs in a timely manner


Factor 3

“to be flexible and fast in perceiving changes and adjusting to them in order to keep the software aligned to the business needs” (P1)

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Has an alignment between the business needs and the software requirements


Factor 4

“we need to be able to distinguish what is a wishful and a desirable need” (P3)

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Finds the balance between what the customer ‘wants’ and what the customer ‘really needs’

“it is challenging to know the business processes in details...” (P2)


Factor 5

“our current org structure makes it hard to communicate with others and clarify things when needed” (P8)

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Has a requirements engineering process that efficiently and effectively defines what has to be

done


Factor 6

“knowing how to approach the business teams” (P2)

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Has an adequate and qualified team

“knowing how to identify who are the right stakeholders and to establish connections with them” (P11)


Factor 7

“we cannot forget that this is expected from any software project” (P5)

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Delivers on time, on budget, and with quality


Issue 1

“... they [senior management] need to realize how much this structure delays reaching out who is responsible for the business processes, the real owners of the software demands” (P11)

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To have a mediator between the business department and the IT team


Issue 2

“it is only at testing time that we learn that business rules have changed” (P7)

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To validate requirements too late in the development lifecycle

“prototyping could be used to validate the requirements” (P2)


Issue 3

“requests to decide on the projects roadmap is not made based on standardized business requests” (P2)

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To have poorly written software requirements


Issue 4

“we assume we know about the business” (P11)

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To work based on assumptions

“but the organization changes so fast that it is risky to assume the definitions from the previous release are still the same now” (P6)


Issue 5

“we have this bad habit of adding things we think that will help” (P7)

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To implement improvements that were not requested

“this pro-active behavior is often nosy” (P1)


How does SEng helps ORG?

• Agile methods vs. Waterfall

• Centralized organization

• Imposed communication channels

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Thank you for your attention!

Questions?Comments?Suggestions?

Sabrina [email protected]

Presented by and Main contact for this work

Workshop on DSD, SECO, and SoSSept 28, 2014Maceió, Brazil

WDES 2014 paper: On the Identification of Factors that Promote High- Performance Projects in...

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