A Comparative Study of Value in Agile Software Development Organizations

Abstract: Context. Agile software development mainly focuses on value creation, and the first principle of theAgile Manifesto is to deliver a valuable software to customers. In spite of the great significance of value,there are few studies investigated what value is from the perspective of industry practitioners. Objectives. In this study we perform a replication study about value definitions, usage, andmeasurements in China and make a comparative analysis with the similar study did in Sweden. Theprimary objectives of this study are to: a) identify value aspects from Chinese software organizations;b) list and describe activities to achieve or maximize the value aspects, and also with the measurements;c) find the similarities and differences between China and Sweden. Methods. The data was collected by using the semi-structured interviews from 30 participants in 20Chinese agile software development organizations. We utilized the content analysis and the Statisticsmethods to analyze the 30 data points. Results. The participants identified 18 value aspects and prioritized them, and the value aspects wereanalyzed by domains and roles. The three most important value aspects are the Delivery process w.r.t.time, Organization, and Team members; different domain focused on different value aspects; the projectmanager concerned more about the Delivery process w.r.t. time, Organization, and Team members,while the product owners focused more on Customer satisfaction. Then, we list and described theactivities to achieve or maximize the value aspects, described some methods and strategies tomeasure/assure/evaluate them. Most of the activities were related to agile practices and the mostactivities were used to achieve the Delivery process w.r.t. time. Finally, we presented the similaritiesand differences between those value results from China and Sweden, the most important difference isthat the Swedish participants put the Customer value perspective at the first place, while Chineseparticipants would like to balance the value between Customer and Internal Business. Conclusions. We concluded that: 1) the Chinese participants thought that the key success factor of asoftware product was to delivery it with high quality to customers on time; 2) the main activities toachieve value were related to agile practices, and some participants used some tools to assure projectprocess; 3) For better communications and collaborations between Chinese and Swedish softwarecompanies, we recommend: a) for Chinese companies, they need to i) concern more about Customerperspective than before; ii) understand the core concepts of agile methods and their using contexts forflexible application; iii) transfer from traditional organization architecture to project-based organizationarchitecture; b) for Swedish companies, they need to i) focus more on Internal business perspective; ii)use some tools and methods to achieve their value aspects; iii) find a suitable way to collaborate betweenagile teams and non-agile teams.