Sebis Research News

The widespread use of agile methods shows a fundamental shift in the way organizations try to cope with unpredictable competitive environments. In large-scale agile settings, multiple development activities need to be coordinated to achieve desirable enterprise-wide effects and agility. A powerful instrument to effectively guide and steer large-scale agile endeavors is the formulation and usage of architecture principles.
Despite their raison d'être to guide large organizational transformations, extant studies on how principles can be used to support large-scale agile transformations are still lacking.

Against this backdrop, we present a multiple-case study involving five German companies that aims to shed light on the establishment of architecture principles to support large-scale agile transformations. Based on our results from sixteen semi-structured interviews, we present current practices as well as challenges faced by organizations during the application of architecture principles. In addition, we show a set of principles used to support large-scale agile transformations.

Ever since the release of the agile manifesto in 2001, agile methods have received widespread interest in industry and academia. Agile methods have transformed and brought unique changes to software development practices by strongly emphasizing team collaboration, change tolerance, and active customer involvement. Their proven benefits have also inspired organizations to apply them in large-scale settings. However, the adoption of agile methods at scale entails unique challenges such as coordinating and aligning multiple large-scale agile activities, dealing with internal silos, and establishing an agile culture & mindset throughout the organization. In particular, agile coaches and scrum masters are confronted with unprecedented concerns in large-scale agile development. Notwithstanding their importance for large-scale agile endeavors, extant literature still lacks an overview of their typical concerns and a collection of patterns to address them. Against this backdrop, we provide an overview of typical concerns and present five best practices of agile coaches and scrum masters in large-scale agile development.

The introduction of agile methods at scale entails unique concerns such as inter-team coordination, dependencies to other organizational units, or distribution of work without a defined architecture. Compared to the rich body of agile software development literature describing typical challenges and best practices, recurring concerns and patterns in large-scale agile development are not yet documented extensively. We aim to fill this gap by presenting a pattern language for large-scale agile software development as part of our larger research initiative in close collaboration with 10 companies. The structure and practical relevance of the proposed language were evaluated by 14 interviews. In this paper, we showcase our pattern language by presenting four patterns.

The paper titled "Consumer Protection in the Digital Era: The Potential of Customer-Centered LegalTech" was pusblished at INFORMATIK 2019.

Abstract:

New technologies and tools, often summarised under the term “LegalTech”, are changing the way in which legal professionals work. The digital transformation has changed many aspects of our daily life and democratised access to knowledge and services. In the legal domain, however, consumers rarely benefit from digitisation. On the contrary, they are often overpowered by big corporations and their well equipped legal departments. In this paper, we outline how LegalTech can be used to empower consumers in the digital era, by building tools to support consumers and those who protect them. In order to show the potential of customer-centered LegalTech, we present two prototypes which semantically analyse, assess, and summarise Terms of Services from German web shops.

Six sebis papers were presented at the AMCIS conference 2019 in Cancun:

• Bondel, G., Bui, D. H., Faber, A., Seidel, D., Hauder, M.: Towards a Process and Tool Support for Collaborative API Proposal Management
• Kleehaus, M.; Hauder, M.; Uludag, O.; Corpancho, N.; Matthes, F.: IT Landscape Discovery via Runtime Instrumentation for Automating Enterprise Architecture Model Maintenance
• Huth, D., and Matthes, F.: "Appropriate Technical and Organizational Measures": Identifying Privacy Engineering Approaches to Meet GDPR Requirements
• Uludağ, Ö.; Kleehaus, M.; Reiter, N.; Matthes, F.: What to Expect from Enterprise Architects in Large-Scale Agile Development? A Multiple-Case Study
• Uludağ, Ö.; Nägele, S.; Hauder, M.: Establishing Architecture Guidelines in Large-Scale Agile Development Through Institutional Pressures
• Faber, A.; Riemhofer, M.; Rehm, S.-V.; Bondel, G.: A Systematic Mapping Study on Business Ecosystem Types (Best Conference Paper Runner-up)