Casper Lassenius

Aalto University · Department of Computer Science

As agile software development is increasingly adopted in the software industry, the popularity of scaling frameworks supporting adoption in large development contexts is increasing rapidly. While several such frameworks exist, the most popular one at the moment is the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Despite its popularity, there exists limited resea...

Context Success with agile methods in the small scale has led to an increasing adoption also in large development undertakings and organizations. Recent years have also seen an increasing amount of primary research on the topic, as well as a number of systematic literature reviews. However, there is no systematic overview of the whole research fiel...

Context: Success with agile methods in the small scale has led to an increasing adoption also in large development undertakings and organizations. Recent years have also seen an increasing amount of primary research on the topic, as well as a number of systematic literature reviews. However, there is no systematic overview of the whole research fie...

Agile methods and the related concepts of employee empowerment, self-management, and autonomy have reached large-scale software organizations and raise questions about commonly adopted principles for authority distribution. However, the optimum mechanism to balance the need for alignment, quality, and process control with the need or willingness of...

Context: Backsourcing is the process of insourcing previously outsourced activities. When companies experience environmental or strategic changes, or challenges with outsourcing, backsourcing can be a viable alternative. While outsourcing and related processes have been extensively studied in software engineering, few studies report experiences wit...

Context A widely adopted methodology, agile software development provides enhanced flexibility to actively adjust a project scope. In agile teams, particularly in distributed environment, developers interact, manage requirements knowledge, and coordinate primarily in online collaboration tools. Developer conversations become invaluable sources to t...

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2021, which was held virtually during June 14-18, 2021. XP is the premier agile software development conference combining research and practice. It is a unique forum where agile researchers, practitioners, thought leaders, coache...

This paper describes how autonomy emerged in a team in a large public organization and which factors were important in this process. The organization has back sourced software development and abandoned a stage-based software development process with many handovers between business, IT and vendors. We collected data in four semi-structured interview...

The agile conference (http://www.agilealliance.org/agile2019/) is the largest global symposium on agile software development, catering particularly to practitioners. Agile 2019, held 5-9 August in Washington, D.C., drew more than 2,400 participants.

Context: DevOps is considered important in the ability to frequently and reliably update a system in operational state. DevOps presumes cross-functional collaboration and automation between software development and operations. DevOps adoption and implementation in companies is non-trivial due to required changes in technical, organisational and cul...

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is currently the most widely adopted framework for scaling agile in the software intensive industry. Despite this, there exists very little scientific research on the transformation process, as well as on the challenges and success factors of using SAFe in large-scale organizations. To start filling in this researc...

When adopting agile development in a global organization with up to 40 teams working on a single product, Ericsson had to decide how to handle decisions affecting several teams. The solution, called community-based decision making, grew out of this experience.

Context: Requirements Engineering (RE) has established itself as a software engineering discipline over the past decades. While researchers have been investigating the RE discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, attempts to systematically derive an empirical theory in context of the RE discipline have just recently been started. However, su...

Reports on meetings and events that were part of the 2018 Agile Conference hat took place August 6-10 in San Diego, CA.

Modern release engineering practices provide multiple benefits for software companies, but organizations have struggled when trying to adopt the most advanced practices, such as continuous delivery. It is not known in which contexts the most advanced practices are applicable and what can be achieved by adopting them. In this study, we discuss the e...

Many large organizations are adopting agile software development as part of their continuous push towards higher flexibility and shorter lead times, yet few reports on large-scale agile transformations are available in the literature. In this paper we report how Ericsson introduced agile in a new R&D product development program developing a XaaS pl...

Teaching of software engineering using capstone projects has seen a steady growth over the years with overwhelmingly positive reported experiences. Discerning what students consider of value before and after a software project course, is crucial for developing a relevant curriculum. This paper reports on the affective learning outcomes of a Scrum b...

Requirements Engineering (RE) has established itself as a software engineering discipline during the past decades. While researchers have been investigating the RE discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, attempts to systematically derive an empirically-based theory in context of the RE discipline have just recently been started. However, s...

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has been adopted by a large number of organizations to scale agile to large enterprises that develop software. At the moment, SAFe seems to be the most predominant agile scaling framework. Despite the current popularity of SAFe in the software intensive industry, there exists surprisingly little research on the ado...

In a large organization, informal communication and simple backlogs are not sufficient for the management of requirements and development work. Many large organizations are struggling to successfully adopt agile methods, but there is still little scientific knowledge on requirements management in large-scale agile development organizations. We pres...

In educational projects, having students encounter problems is desirable, if it increases learning. However, in capstone projects with industrial customers, negative effects problems can have on customer satisfaction must be considered. We conducted a survey in a capstone project course in order to study problems, learning and customer satisfaction...

Context: Traditional technology transfer models rely on the assumption that innovations are created in academia, after which they are transferred to industry using a sequential flow of activities. This model is outdated in contemporary software engineering research that is done in close collaboration between academia and industry and in large conso...

Team-level retrospectives are widely used in agile and lean software development, yet little is known about what is actually discussed during retrospectives or their outcomes. In this paper, we synthesise the outcomes of sprint retrospectives in a large, distributed, agile software development organisation. This longitudinal case study analyses dat...

Today, many software companies continuously deliver and deploy new features to their customers. However, many software systems are still released traditionally with long feature freeze periods and time-based releases due to historical reasons. Currently, only a few empirical inquiries of transformations towards continuous delivery exist. In this pa...

The Agile Conference is the largest global conference on agile software development, catering particularly to practitioners. This article reports on three keynotes at Agile 2017 and the second year of an IEEE Software conference initiative.

The Agile Conference is the largest global conference on agile software development, catering particularly to practitioners. Agile 2016 had a record 2,500 participants. This article reports on two keynotes and a new IEEE Software conference initiative.

Context: Continuous delivery is a software development discipline in which software is always kept releasable. The literature contains instructions on how to adopt continuous delivery, but the adoption has been challenging in practice. Objective: In this study, a systematic literature review is conducted to survey the faced problems when adopting...

Context: Continuous delivery (CD) is a development practice for decreasing the time-to-market by keeping software releasable all the time. Adopting CD within a stage-gate managed development process might be useful, although scientific evidence of such adoption is not available. In a stage-gate process, new releases pass through stages and gates pr...

Context: In continuous delivery, the aim is that every feature passes through the integration and deployment pipeline, resulting in an immediately deployable product. This practice has been proposed to accelerate value delivery, improve software quality and increase developer productivity. Goal: We investigate the adoption of continuous delivery pr...

Information Systems in Distributed Environment (ISDE) is becoming a prominent standard in this globalization era due to advancement in information and communication technologies. The advent of the Inter- net has supported Distributed Software Development (DSD) by intro- ducing new concepts and opportunities, resulting in benefits such as scalabilit...

Requirements Engineering (RE) has received much attention in research and practice due to its importance to software project success. Its inter-disciplinary nature, the dependency to the customer, and its inherent uncertainty still render the discipline dicult to investigate. This results in a lack of empirical data. These are necessary, however, t...

We present a case study on scaling Scrum in a large globally distributed software development project at Nokia, a global telecommunications company. We discuss how the case project scaled Scrum while growing from two collocated Scrum teams to 20 teams located in four countries and employing a total of 170 persons. Moreover, we report scaling challe...

Users continue to stumble upon software bugs, despite developers' efforts to build and test high-quality software. Although traditional testing and quality assurance techniques are extremely valuable, software testing should pay more attention to exploration. Exploration can directly apply knowledge and learning to the core of industrial software t...

Agile methods have become an appealing alternative for companies striving to improve their performance, but the methods were originally designed for small and individual teams. This creates unique challenges when introducing agile at scale, when development teams must synchronize their activities, and there might be a need to interface with other o...

Agile methods have become an appealing alternative for large companies striving to improve their performance, even though the methods were originally designed for small, single teams. Our recently performed systematic literature review on large-scale agile transformations revealed that despite the popularity of the topic in the industry, it has rec...

Kanban is a workflow management method especially suitable for managing continuous software engineering work. We attempted to teach Kanban and lean thinking in a software project management course in Aalto University with a collaborative Kanban board game. Our goal was to measure if the learning goals of the class were reached and to study the stud...

The relationship between customers and suppliers remains a challenge in agile software development. Two trends seek to improve this relationship, the increased focus on value and the move towards continuous deployment. In this special section on continuous value delivery, we describe these emerging research themes and show the increasing interest i...

This paper describes lessons learned from teaching a distributed virtual course on collaborative innovation networks (COINs) over the last 12 years at five different sites located in four different time zones. The course teaches students how to leverage virtual collaborative creativity in the internet age by making best use of email, social media,...

Agile software development (ASD) methods have gained popularity in the industry and been the subject of an increasing amount of academic research. Although requirements engineering (RE) in ASD has been studied, the overall understanding of RE in ASD as a phenomenon is still weak. We conducted a mapping study of RE in ASD to review the scientific li...

Continuous delivery is a software development discipline in which software can be released to production at any time. The proposed dissertation aims to understand the problems that emerge when adopting continuous delivery and find solutions to those problems. The goal is reached by performing a systematic literature review followed by case studies....

Signal processing software is characterized by a heavy emphasis on arithmetic calculations and the lack of complicated control structures, placing specific constraints on which testing techniques are applicable and how signal processing software can be efficiently tested. In this paper, we analyze the unique characteristics of signal processing sof...

Managing software product development is challenging, especially for small companies in which a balance has to be struck between development flexibility and management control while working under tight schedule and resource constraints. While there exists several approaches to software process improvement, such as the CMM and SPICE reference framew...

The 5th annual international conference on Collaborative Innovation Networks Conference (COINS) takes place at Keio University from March 12 to 14, 2015. COINS15 brings together practitioners, researchers and students of the emerging science of collaboration to share their work, learn from each other, and get inspired through creative new ideas. Wh...

Context Communities of practice—groups of experts who share a common interest or topic and collectively want to deepen their knowledge—can be an important part of a successful lean and agile adoption in particular in large organizations. Objective In this paper, we present a study on how a large organization within Ericsson with 400 persons in 40...

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are groups of experts who share a common interest or topic and collectively want to deepen their knowledge. The use of CoPs is one of the practices that agile practitioner literature suggests for knowledge sharing and coordination in large-scale agile software development. Even though CoPs are largely used and studied...

Context Software project failures are common. Even though the reasons for failures have been widely studied, the analysis of their causal relationships is lacking. This creates an illusion that the causes of project failures are unrelated. Objective The aim of this study is to conduct in-depth analysis of software project failures in four software...

Time pressure is prevalent in the software industry in which shorter and shorter deadlines and high customer demands lead to increasingly tight deadlines. However, the effects of time pressure have received little attention in software engineering research. We performed a controlled experiment on time pressure with 97 observations from 54 subjects....

In this paper, we present a LEGO-based Scrum simulation game that we used twice with Master’s level students at Aalto University. The game was initially developed as an internal training tool in F-Secure Corporation, a Finnish security software company, to support their agile adoption. In the game, student teams learn the Scrum roles, events and co...

This paper describes how a rapidly growing distributed product development organization at Ericsson used ”Value Workshops” to align the different sites and teams when adopting agile and lean software development. The workshops were held at two main sites, and involved people from four sites. During the workshops, the teams worked on common values:...

Context Root cause analysis (RCA) is a useful practice for software project retrospectives, and is typically carried out in synchronous collocated face-to-face meetings. Conducting RCA with distributed teams is challenging, as face-to-face meetings are infeasible. Lack of adequate real-time tool support exacerbates this problem. Furthermore, there...

This paper presents a case study on building a successful agile coaching team focusing on global software development projects in an international Nordic‐based software company. We describe how the team of eight coaches was built, and how the coaches work together as a team using agile practices, such as weekly iterations, backlogs, and daily stand...

Context The analysis and selection of requirements are important parts of any release planning process. Previous studies on release planning have focused on plan-driven optimization models. Unfortunately, solving the release planning problem mechanistically is difficult in an agile development context. Objective We describe how a release planning...

Context: Proponents of the Scrum software development method use the term "Scrum But" to refer to harmful changes to Scrum. Scrum has been increasingly adopted in large software development organizations. This has led to changes to Scrum practices, but it is not known if these changes are harmful. Objective: We studied how the requirements were pla...

While global software development (GSD) projects face cultural and time differences, the biggest challenge is communication. We studied a distributed student project with an industrial customer. The project lasted 3 months, involved 25 participants, and was distributed between the University of Victoria, Canada and Aalto University, Finland. We ana...

Transforming a large organization from a plan-driven process to agile development is challenging. Despite this, large organizations are increasingly adopting agile development and lean thinking. However, there is little research on how to conduct a successful transformation in large organizations, which often are globally distributed. In this paper...

Where science, design, business and art meet, COINs13 looks at the emerging forces behind the phenomena of open-source, creative, entrepreneurial and social movements. COINs13 combines a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as social network analysis, group dynamics, design and visualization, information systems, collective action and the ps...

Scrum development at large-scale requires a release planning process that supports the agile way of working and planning. Most of the existing release planning processes are plan-driven and ill suited for a large Scrum organization. This case study describes how release planning was conducted in a 350-person Scrum development organization with over...

The main objective of U-QASAR is to create a flexible Quality Assurance, Control and Measurement Methodology to measure the quality of Internet-related software development projects and their resulting products. The methodology will be supported by an Internet solution composed of several knowledge services based on open standards that will be able...

We present a field study on how testers use knowledge while performing exploratory software testing (ET) in industrial settings. We video recorded 12 testing sessions in four industrial organizations, having our subjects think aloud while performing their usual functional testing work. Using applied grounded theory, we analyzed how the subjects per...

In this paper we describe distributed Scrum augmented with best practices in global software engineering (GSE) as an important paradigm for teaching critical competencies in GSE. We report on a globally distributed project course between the University of Victoria, Canada and Aalto University, Finland. The project-driven course involved 16 students...

The aim of the Need for Speed (N4S) Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) is to create the foundation for the success of the Finnish software intensive businesses in the new digital economy. During the program we will see the global digital services business growing in Finland and totally new Finnish brands in digital business introduced. The Internet is...

Global distribution of software engineering introduces geographical, temporal, cultural and organizational distance into teamwork. Globally distributed software projects need to use electronic communication tools to collaborate across these distances. Communication media differ in properties and capabilities to overcome the challenges imposed by th...

Scrum-of-Scrums meeting is mentioned in the literature as the mechanism for handling inter-team coordination in large-scale Scrum. However, how to implement it in projects with tens of teams is not explained. In this paper, we present a multiple case study on how Scrum-of-Scrum meetings were applied in two large-scale, globally distributed Scrum pr...

Global distribution of software engineering introduces geographical, temporal, cultural and organizational distance into teamwork. Communication media differ in properties and capabilities to overcome the challenges imposed by these distances. Media Synchronicity Theory (MST) aims at explaining the capabilities of communication media and their effe...

The Product Owner in Scrum is a crucial role responsible for managing customer requirements in the form of prioritized backlog items and communicating them to the Scrum team. When scaling Scrum to large projects consisting of tens of teams, one Product Owner is not able to work with all the teams; thus the role needs to be scaled. While the literat...