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Three papers presented at HICSS 2020

Three sebis research papers were presented at the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS) 2020:

 

Huth, D., Burmeister, F., Matthes, F., and Schirmer, I. 2020. "Empirical Results on the Collaboration Between Enterprise Architecture and Data Protection Management during the Implementation of the GDPR"

Abstract: The European General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) large imminent fines cause companies worldwide to undertake major efforts for privacy compliance. Any company doing business with European customers has to adhere to new processing principles and documentation requirements, and provide extensive access rights to data subjects.
Enterprise architecture management (EAM) provides a theoretical and methodical framework to align business and IT and has been used, among others, to identify and address concerns that arose from regulation.
In this work, we report results from 24 qualitative interviews with 29 enterprise architects on how EAM supports the work of data protection management (DPM) experts. We derive a conceptual framework with four different levels of EAM support for DPM, and discuss high-level recommendations for each level.

 

Burmeister, F., Huth, D., Schirmer, I., Drews, P., and Matthes, F. 2020. "Enhancing Information Governance with Enterprise Architecture Management : Design Principles Derived from Benefits and Barriers in the GDPR Implementation"

Abstract: Businesses today are increasingly dependent on how they transform information into economic value, while simultaneously being compliant with intensified privacy requirements, resulting from legal acts like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As a consequence, realizing information governance has become a topic more important than ever to balance the beneficial use and protection of information. This paper argues that enterprise architecture management (EAM) can be a key to GDPR implementation as one important domain of information governance by providing transparency on information integration throughout an organization. Based on 24 interviews with 29 enterprise architects, we identified a multiplicity of benefits and barriers within the interplay of EAM and GDPR implementation and derived seven design principles that should foster EAM to enhance information governance.

 

Kleehaus, M., Corpancho, N., Huth, D., Matthes, F. 2020. "Discovery of Microservice-based IT Landscapes at Runtime: Algorithms and Visualizations"

Abstract: The documentation of IT landscapes is a challenging task which is still performed mainly manually. Technology and software development trends like agile practices and microservice-based architectures exacerbate the endeavours to keep documentation up-to-date. Recent research efforts for automating this task have not addressed runtime data for gathering the architecture and remain unclear regarding proper algorithms and visualization support. In this paper, we want to close this research gap by presenting two algorithms that 1) discover the IT landscape based on historical data and 2) create continuously architecture snapshots based on new incoming runtime data. We especially consider scenarios in which runtime artifacts or communications paths were removed from the architecture as those cases are challenging to unveil from runtime data. We evaluate our prototype by analyzing the monitoring data from 79 days of a big automotive company. The algorithms provided promising results. The implemented prototype allows stakeholders to explore the snapshots in order to analyze the emerging behavior of the microservice-based IT landscape.


Paper Investigating the Establishment of Architecture Principles for Supporting Large-Scale Agile Transformations at EDOC 2019

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.


Paper titled Recurring Concerns and Best Practices of Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters at PLoP 2019

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.


Paper titled Documenting Recurring Concerns and Patterns in Large-Scale Agile Development accepted at EuroPLoP 2019

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.


Six papers presented at AMCIS 2019

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