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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 15th State of Agile Survey. https://bit.ly/3azEj5r

  2. Due to the sensitivity of the results presented here-in, the organization chose to stay incognito. Therefore, in this paper, we use fictitious names of the company and the product.

  3. 15th State of Agile Survey. https://bit.ly/3azEj5r

  4. Atlassian Confluence https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence

  5. Microsoft Azure DevOps Server, https://azure.microsoft.com/it-it/services/devops/server/

  6. Selenium WebDriver, https://www.selenium.dev

  7. Test plans, Azure DevOps Service. https://bit.ly/3aRlmdv

  8. User story, Agile Alliance. https://bit.ly/369HxtY

  9. Azure DevOps Service, bug management. https://bit.ly/3thSZgZ

  10. Microsoft .NET. https://bit.ly/2Muc3If

  11. NET Core, ThreadPool Starvation. http://bit.ly/3ozYnII

  12. Nonfunctional Requirements - Scaled Agile Framework. https://bit.ly/3ohrZun

  13. Definition of Done, Agile Alliance. http://bit.ly/2YbdkWS

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the project “Software Performance in Agile/DevOps context (funded within Programma Operativo'' Nazionale Ricerca e Innovazione 2014- 2020) and “Territori Aperti” (a project funded by Fondo Territori Lavoro e Conoscenza CGIL, CSIL and UIL). I would like to thank Vittorio Cortellessa for making this industry collaboration possible. I would also like to thank him for the useful suggestions and comments that were helpful in improving the paper.

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  1. University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy

    Luca Traini

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Correspondence to Luca Traini.

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Communicated by: Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Weiyi Shang, Cor-Paul Bezemer, Andre van Hoorn and Catia Trubiani

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Traini, L. Exploring Performance Assurance Practices and Challenges in Agile Software Development: An Ethnographic Study. Empir Software Eng 27, 74 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10069-3

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