Introduction to Agile and Lean Organizations: Management, Metrics, and Products Minitrack

In this mini-track, research papers and experience reports describe how agile development and lean product management interact with organizations, their structures, cultures and products. We expect several industry and academic leaders to attend and hope to inspire greater collaboration. Agile software development and lean product management claim to dramatically improve the efficiency and value produced by organizations, over long-range planning and waterfall management. Agile development methods promote iterative product releases and drive risk-reduction earlier in product development. Lean product management methods test hypotheses and rapidly adapt to discoveries. The participants in this mini-track hail from both academic and industrial sources. We hope mixing the two will help motivate more industry-needed research, which benefits researchers with higher relevance and citations, and more collaboration, which benefits industry by offloading otherwise impossible experimentation and investigation to academia. We are hosting a panel in this mini-track, “Enterprise Metrics and Agile Adoption,” including Jeff Sutherland (inventor of Scrum), Larry Maccherone (Director of Analytics at Rally), Dan Greening (Agile Coach Team ScrumMaster at Skype) and others. We expect this to be a lively exchange on an often-controversial topic. In “The influence of organizational factors...,” Vivienne Almeida dos Santos et al examine influencing factors, such as organizational strategy, and communication flow and channels, regarding inter-team knowledge sharing effectiveness in agile environments. In “Teams that Finish Early Accelerate Faster ...”, Jeff Sutherland et al propose nine patterns that lead to over 400% improvement in team productivity, based on the experience of several agile leaders. In “Theme-based Product Release Planning ...”, Nishant Agarwal et al describe a technique for identifying thematic connections implied by a dependency graph, to automatically suggest features to include in releases. In “Toward an Understanding of Preference ...”, David Bishop et al investigate the personality factors that lead to preference (and presumed success) in agile methods. In “State-of-the-Art”, Markus Hummel reviews the quantitative research results in agile information systems and software engineering. He highlights several areas where more research is needed. Last year’s Agile and Lean Organizations minitrack had lively interaction that inspired new ideas and approaches. This year’s iteration promises to meet or beat it. 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Science