05 Fakultät Informatik, Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/6
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Item Open Access An empirical study on changing leadership in agile teams(2021) Spiegler, Simone V.; Heinecke, Christoph; Wagner, StefanAn increasing number of companies aim to enable their development teams to work in an agile manner. When introducing agile teams, companies face several challenges. This paper explores the kind of leadership needed to support teams to work in an agile way. One theoretical agile leadership concept describes a Scrum Master who is supposed to empower the team to lead itself. Empirical findings on such a leadership role are controversial. We still have not understood how leadership unfolds in a team that is by definition self-organizing. Further exploration is needed to better understand leadership in agile teams. Our goal is to explore how leadership changes while the team matures using the example of the Scrum Master. Through a grounded theory study containing 75 practitioners from 11 divisions at the Robert Bosch GmbH we identified a set of nine leadership roles that are transferred from the Scrum Master to the Development Team while it matures. We uncovered that a leadership gap and a supportive internal team climate are enablers of the role transfer process, whereas role conflicts may diminish the role transfer. To make the Scrum Master change in a mature team, team members need to receive trust and freedom to take on a leadership role which was previously filled by the Scrum Master. We conclude with practical implications for managers, Product Owners, Development Teams and Scrum Masters which they can apply in real settings.Item Open Access Industry practices and challenges for the evolvability assurance of microservices : an interview study and systematic grey literature review(2021) Bogner, Justus; Fritzsch, Jonas; Wagner, Stefan; Zimmermann, AlfredMicroservices as a lightweight and decentralized architectural style with fine-grained services promise several beneficial characteristics for sustainable long-term software evolution. Success stories from early adopters like Netflix, Amazon, or Spotify have demonstrated that it is possible to achieve a high degree of flexibility and evolvability with these systems. However, the described advantageous characteristics offer no concrete guidance and little is known about evolvability assurance processes for microservices in industry as well as challenges in this area. Insights into the current state of practice are a very important prerequisite for relevant research in this field. We therefore wanted to explore how practitioners structure the evolvability assurance processes for microservices, what tools, metrics, and patterns they use, and what challenges they perceive for the evolvability of their systems. We first conducted 17 semi-structured interviews and discussed 14 different microservice-based systems and their assurance processes with software professionals from 10 companies. Afterwards, we performed a systematic grey literature review (GLR) and used the created interview coding system to analyze 295 practitioner online resources. The combined analysis revealed the importance of finding a sensible balance between decentralization and standardization. Guidelines like architectural principles were seen as valuable to ensure a base consistency for evolvability and specialized test automation was a prevalent theme. Source code quality was the primary target for the usage of tools and metrics for our interview participants, while testing tools and productivity metrics were the focus of our GLR resources. In both studies, practitioners did not mention architectural or service-oriented tools and metrics, even though the most crucial challenges like Service Cutting or Microservices Integration were of an architectural nature. Practitioners relied on guidelines, standardization, or patterns like Event-Driven Messaging to partially address some reported evolvability challenges. However, specialized techniques, tools, and metrics are needed to support industry with the continuous evaluation of service granularity and dependencies. Future microservices research in the areas of maintenance, evolution, and technical debt should take our findings and the reported industry sentiments into account.Item Open Access Stakeholder identification for a structured release planning approach in the automotive domain(2022) Marner, Kristina; Wagner, Stefan; Ruhe, GuentherIn regulated domains like automotive, release planning is a complex process. This complex process consists of an agreement between product development processes for hardware as well as mechanic systems and approaches for software development. Particularly in automotive, the creation and synchronization of release plans for hardware as well as software is a challenge. Within the whole complex system development, it is challenging to consider the relevant stakeholders in the initial creation of a release plan. Depending on the context that a release plan shall be created for, there are different stakeholders that have to be considered from the beginning. There are numerous publications in the area of release planning, but there is no detailed research that shows which stakeholders have to be addressed in the automotive context. The aim of this work is to identify stakeholders of a release plan as an appropriate approach to create transparency in release planning in the automotive domain. Action research to elaborate relevant stakeholders for release planning was conducted at Dr. Ing. h. c. F. Porsche AG. We present a detailed overview of identified stakeholders as well as their required content and added value regarding two pilot projects. With this contribution, identified stakeholders of release planning from the hardware and software points of view are introduced. We discuss, based on the results, why there are common stakeholders for the two projects and why there are individual stakeholders for each project. With this work, we present a more complete stakeholder identification and a more detailed understanding of their needs.Item Open Access How do ML practitioners perceive explainability? : an interview study of practices and challenges(2024) Habiba, Umm-e-; Habib, Mohammad Kasra; Bogner, Justus; Fritzsch, Jonas; Wagner, StefanExplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is a field of study that focuses on the development process of AI-based systems while making their decision-making processes understandable and transparent for users. Research already identified explainability as an emerging requirement for AI-based systems that use machine learning (ML) techniques. However, there is a notable absence of studies investigating how ML practitioners perceive the concept of explainability, the challenges they encounter, and the potential trade-offs with other quality attributes. In this study, we want to discover how practitioners define explainability for AI-based systems and what challenges they encounter in making them explainable. Furthermore, we explore how explainability interacts with other quality attributes. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 ML practitioners from 11 companies. Our study reveals diverse viewpoints on explainability and applied practices. Results suggest that the importance of explainability lies in enhancing transparency, refining models, and mitigating bias. Methods like SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanation (LIME) are frequently used by ML practitioners to understand how models work, while tailored approaches are typically adopted to meet the specific requirements of stakeholders. Moreover, we have discerned emerging challenges in eight categories. Issues such as effective communication with non-technical stakeholders and the absence of standardized approaches are frequently stated as recurring hurdles. We contextualize these findings in terms of requirements engineering and conclude that industry currently lacks a standardized framework to address arising explainability needs.