Lucas Gren

• Ph.D. in Software Engineering, Master's Degrees in Psychology, Business Administration and Industrial Engineering and Management.
• Professor (Assistant) at Chalmers University of Technology and The University of Gothenburg

Recent research suggests that agile leadership is regarded as shared, transformational, and dynamic, in the view of technical leaders themselves. Also, it promotes collaboration and a strong sense of belonging, requiring a balance in integrating different organizational cultures. On the other hand, previous research overlooks the perspective of dev...

From 2019 to 2022, Volvo Cars successfully translated our research discoveries regarding group dynamics within agile teams into widespread industrial practice. We wish to illuminate the insights gained through the process of garnering support, providing training, executing implementation, and sustaining a tool embraced by approximately 700 teams an...

About seven years ago, Volvo Cars initiated a large-scale agile transformation. Midst this journey, a significant restructuring of the R&D department took place. Our study aims to illuminate how team maturity levels are impacted during such comprehensive reorganizations. We collected data from 63 teams to comprehend the effects of organizational ch...

Leadership in agile teams is a collective responsibility where team members share leadership work based on expertise and skills. However, the understanding of leadership in this context is limited. This study explores the under-researched area of prototypical leadership, aiming to understand if and how leaders who are perceived as more representati...

Researchers are increasingly recognizing the importance of human aspects in software development. Because qualitative methods are used to explore human behavior in‐depth, we believe that studies using such methods will become more common. Existing qualitative software engineering guidelines do not cover the full breadth of qualitative methods and t...

Background: Volvo Cars is pioneering an agile transformation on a large scale in the automotive industry. Social psychological aspects of automotive software development are an under-researched area in general. Few studies on team maturity or group dynamics can be found specifically in the automotive software engineering domain. Objective: This stu...

Effective leadership is one of the key drivers of business and project success, and one of the most active areas of management research. But how does leadership work in agile software development, which emphasizes self-management and self-organization and marginalizes traditional leadership roles? To find out, this study examines agile leadership f...

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-021-00354-4

Expert judgement is a common method for software effort estimations in practice today. Estimators are often shown extra obsolete requirements together with the real ones to be implemented. Only one previous study has been conducted on if such practices bias the estimations. We conducted six experiments with both students and practitioners to study,...

Context: Expert judgement is a common method for software effort estimations in practice today. Estimators are often shown extra obsolete requirements together with the real ones to be implemented. Only one previous study has been conducted on if such practices bias the estimations. Objective: We conducted six experiments with both students and pra...

A key goal of empirical research in software engineering is to assess practical significance, which answers whether the observed effects of some compared treatments show a relevant difference in practice in realistic scenarios. Even though plenty of standard techniques exist to assess statistical significance, connecting it to practical significanc...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest additional aspects of social psychology that could help when making sense of autonomous agile teams. To make use of well-tested theories in social psychology and instead see how they replicated and differ in the autonomous agile team context would avoid reinventing the wheel. This was done, as an initial step...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest additional aspects of social psychology that could help when making sense of autonomous agile teams. To make use of well-tested theories in social psychology and instead see how they replicated and differ in the autonomous agile team context would avoid reinventing the wheel. This was done, as an initial step...

When large industrial organizations change to (or start with) an agile approach to operations, managers and some employees are supposed to be “agile leaders” often without being given a clear definition of what that comprises when building agile teams. An inductive thematic analysis was used to investigate what 15 appointed leaders actually do and...

When large industrial organizations change to(or start with) an agile approach to operations, managers and some employees are supposed to be "agile leaders" often without being given a clear definition of what that comprises when building agile teams. An inductive thematic analysis was used to investigate what 15 appointed leaders actually do and p...

The Group Development Questionnaire Short (GDQS) Scales, a 13-item short form of the 60-item Group Development Questionnaire, was developed and validated across four studies. The GDQS scales with four items for Scale I, and three items for Scales II–IV, had consistent and acceptable internal consistencies across Studies 1 and 2 (α at or well above...

Contribution: A flipped classroom approach to teaching empirical software engineering increases student learning by providing more time for active learning in class. Background: There is a need for longitudinal studies of the flipped classroom approach in general. Although a few cross-sectional studies show that a flipped classroom approach can inc...

Contribution: This study shows that a flipped classroom approach to teaching empirical software engineering increases student learning by providing more time for active learning in class. Background: Due to the lack of longitudinal studies of the flipped classroom approach in general, and the very few such studies in software engineering education,...

With the agile approach to managing software development projects comes an increased dependability on well‐functioning teams, since many of the practices are built on teamwork. The objective of this study was to investigate if, and how, team development from a group psychological perspective is related to some work practices of agile teams. Data we...

Research has shown that the maturity of small workgroups from a psychological perspective is intimately connected to team agility. We therefore tested if agile team members appreciated group development psychology training. Our results show that the participating teams seem to have a very positive view of group development training and state that t...

With the agile approach to managing software development projects comes an increased dependability on well functioning teams, since many of the practices are built on teamwork. The objective of this study was to investigate if, and how, team development from a group psychological perspective is related to some work practices of agile teams. Data we...

Research has shown that the maturity of small workgroups from a psychological perspective is intimately connected to team agility. We, therefore, tested if agile team members appreciated group development psychology training. Our results show that the participating teams seem to have a very positive view of group development training and state that...

Internal software quality determines the maintainability of the software product and influences the quality in use. There is a plethora of metrics which purport to measure the internal quality of software, and these metrics are offered by static software analysis tools. To date, a number of reports have assessed the validity of these metrics. No da...

There is some ambiguity of what agile means in both research and practice. Authors have suggested a diversity of different definitions, and many practitioners have their own idea of what it is. It is, therefore, difficult to interpret what agile really is. The concept, however, exists in its implementation through agile practices. In this paper, we...

Software engineering research is evolving and papers are increasingly based on empirical data from a multitude of sources, using statistical tests to determine if and to what degree empirical evidence supports their hypotheses. To investigate the practices and trends of statistical analysis in empirical software engineering (ESE), this paper presen...

This paper examines the connection between the Five Factor Model personality traits and burnout in software developers. This study aims to validate generalizations of findings in other fields. An online survey consisting of a miniaturized International Personality Item Pool questionnaire for measuring the Five Factor Model personality traits, and t...

This paper examines the connection between the Five Factor Model personality traits and burnout in software developers. This study aims to validate generalizations of findings in other fields. An online survey consisting of a miniaturized International Personality Item Pool questionnaire for measuring the Five Factor Model personality traits, and t...

Agile methods have gotten a good reputation for managing projects in many different sectors. A challenge among practitioners in the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) domain, is to decide if an agile method is suitable or not for new projects. This study investigates how decision-makers select between agile and plan-driven ERP implementation projec...

Agile requirements engineering implies more complex communication patterns since even the developers are supposed to have direct contact with customers. With more face-to-face communication comes social-psychological factors influencing the requirements. Studies have pointed at the importance of negotiation training, but I argue that more basic hum...

Today, software companies usually organize their work in teams. Social science research on team development has shown that for a team to reach a productive and autonomous stage, it has to be able to manage internal conflicts and disagreements efficiently. To better facilitate the team development process, we argue that software engineers' needs add...

An agile change effort in an organization needs to be understood in relation to human processes. Such theory and accompanying tools already existed almost 50 years ago in applied psychology. The core ideas of Agile Process Consultation are that a client initiating a change toward more agility often does not know what is wrong and the consultant nee...

The purpose of this paper is to review research on attitudes and social norms and connect it to the agile software development context. Furthermore, I propose additional theories from social psychology (mainly the theory of planned behavior and using the degree of internalization of social norms) that would most certainly be useful for further sens...

Agility implies a set of principles that need to be followed in order to have the proposed responsiveness to change. This paper presents how the Agile Adoption Framework can be used to assess agility and pinpoint focus areas for companies that want to improve. Management found it useful in general to get data on possible focus points for improvemen...

Unit testing has been considered as having a key role in building high quality software, and therefore it has been widely used in practice. However, data on the relationship between unit testing and aspects of software quality remain scarce. A survey study with 235 survey responses from seven organizations was conducted in order to understand the c...

Agile processes explicitly focus more on team-work than more traditional management techniques when building software. With high velocity and responsiveness on team-level come the risk of interpersonal conflict in the agile organizations. Through a survey with 68 software developers from three large Swedish companies, I found that the presence of i...

Scholars have tried to explain how organizations can build agile teams by only looking at one level of analysis. We argue in this short paper that lessons can be learned from organizational science results explaining variance on three different abstraction levels of organizations. We suggest agility needs to be explained from organizational (macro)...

Empirical evidence regarding the connection between group development (maturity) and the success of software development teams is lacking. The purpose of this research is to gain a qualitative and quantitative understanding of how velocity and planning effectiveness of software teams connect to a group development model. The Group Development Quest...

There has been some evidence that agility is connected to the group maturity of software development teams. This study aims at conducting group development psychology training with student teams, participating in a project course at university, and compare their group effectiveness score to their agility usage over time in a longitudinal design. Se...

There is a diversity of models explaining organizational culture and how these complex aspects can be addressed in connection to organizational change efforts. This workshop paper claims that models already exist for dealing with the cultural change that an agile transition is in the software engineering context. Instead of realizing this again thr...

The agile approach to projects focuses more on close-knit teams than traditional waterfall projects, which means that aspects of group maturity become even more important. This psychological aspect is not much researched in connection to the building of an "agile team." The purpose of this study is to investigate how building agile teams is connect...

Agile development has now become a well-known approach to collaboration in professional work life. Both researchers and practitioners want validated tools to measure agility. This study sets out to validate an agile maturity measurement model with statistical tests and empirical data. First, a pretest was conducted as a case study including a surve...

The focus on psychology has increased within software engineering due to the project management innovation "agile development processes". The agile methods do not explicitly consider group development aspects; they simply assume what is described in group psychology as mature groups. This study was conducted with 45 employees and their twelve manag...

There are studies showing what happens if agile teams are introduced into a non-agile organization, e.g. higher overhead costs and the necessity of an understanding of agile methods even outside the teams. This case study shows an example of work motivational aspects that might surface when an agile team exists in the middle of a more traditional s...

Effort estimation is a complex area in decision-making, and is influenced by a diversity of factors that could increase the estimation error. The effects on effort estimation accuracy of having obsolete requirements in specifications have not yet been studied. This study aims at filling that gap. A total of 150 students were asked to provide effort...

An agile approach has become very popular over the last decade, which requires good communication and teamwork within teams as well as with outside stakeholders. Therefore, social interaction is central for a software development team to be successful. Such social interactions form social identities and social structures in both teams and organizat...

Social psychology researchers have, traditionally, focused on the construct of thinking rather than on feeling. Since the beginning of the 21st century, social science researchers have, however, increasingly explored the effects of affect. Their work has repeatedly recognized that affects play a crucial role in determining people's behavior. In thi...

Background. There are some publications in software engineer- ing research that aim at guiding researchers in assessing validity threats to their studies. Still, many researchers fail to address many aspects of validity that are essential to quantitative research on human factors. Goal. This paper has the goal of triggering a change of mindset in w...

Context: Existing knowledge in agile software development suggests that individual competency (e.g. skills) is a critical success factor for agile projects. While assuming that technical skills are important for every kind of software development project, many researchers suggest that non-technical individual skills are especially important in agil...

An agile change effort in an organization needs to be understood in relation to human processes. Such theory and accompanying tools already existed almost 50 years ago in applied psychology. The core ideas of Agile Process Consultation are that a client initiating a change toward more agility often does not know what is wrong and the consultant nee...

Agile methods have gotten a good reputation for managing projects in many different sectors. A challenge among practitioners in the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) domain, is to decide if an agile method is suitable or not for new projects. This study investigates how decision-makers select between agile and plan-driven ERP implementation projec...

This note highlights the importance of investigating diversity aspects in combination in empirical research. It draws on the psychological discourse and suggests why and how software engineering scholars can use the aspect of diversity in all their research endeavors.

Today, software companies usually organize their work in teams. Social science research on team development has shown that for a team to reach a productive and autonomous stage, it has to be able to manage internal conflicts and disagreements efficiently. To better facilitate the team development process, we argue that software engineers needs addi...

The purpose of this paper is to review research on attitudes and so- cial norms and connect it to the agile software development context. Furthermore, I propose additional theories from social psychology (mainly the theory of planned behavior and using the degree of internalization of social norms) that would most certainly be useful for further se...

Context: Existing knowledge in agile software development suggests that individual competency (e.g. skills) is a critical success factor for agile projects. While assuming that technical skills are important for every kind of software development project, many researchers suggest that non-technical individual skills are especially important in agil...

Scholars have tried to explain how organizations can build agile teams by only looking at one level of analysis. We argue in this short paper that lessons can be learned from organizational science results explaining variance on three different abstraction levels of organizations. We suggest agility needs to be explained from organizational (macro)...

Agile requirements engineering implies more complex communication patterns since even the developers are supposed to have direct contact with customers. With more face-to-face communication comes social-psychological factors influencing the requirements. Studies have pointed at the importance of negotiation training, but I argue that more basic hum...

Unit testing has been considered as having a key role in building high quality software, and therefore it has been widely used in practice. However, data on the relationship between unit testing and aspects of software quality remain scarce. A survey study with 235 survey responses from seven organizations was conducted in order to understand the c...

Empirical evidence regarding the connection between group development (maturity) and the success of software development teams is lacking. The purpose of this research is to gain a qualitative and quantitative understanding of how velocity and planning effectiveness of software teams connect to a group development model. The Group Development Quest...

Agile processes explicitly focus more on teamwork than more traditional management techniques when building software. With high velocity and responsiveness on team-level come the risk of interpersonal conflict in the agile organizations. Trough a survey with 68 software developers from three large Swedish companies, we found that the presence of in...

Software engineering research is maturing and papers increasingly support their arguments with empirical data from a multitude of sources, using statistical tests to judge if and to what degree empirical evidence supports their hypotheses. This paper presents trends and current state of art regarding statistical maturity in empirical software engin...

Due to the fact that software development is a product of team effort it is important to investigate the influence of group developmental psychology on software development performance. In this case study we wanted to test how performance (i.e. velocity and planning effectiveness) are related to the group's maturity level. We gave the Group Develop...

Brooks' Law is often referred to in practice and states that adding manpower to a late software project makes it even later. Brooks' himself gave three explanation only related to concrete task-related issues, like introducing new members to the work being done, communication overheads, or difficulty dividing some programming tasks. Through a descr...

Effort estimation is a complex area in decision-making, and is influenced by a diversity of factors that could increase the estimation error. The effects on effort estimation accuracy of having obsolete requirements in specifications have not yet been studied. This study aims at filling that gap. A total of 150 students were asked to provide effort...

There has been some evidence that agility is connected to the group maturity of software development teams. This study aims at conducting group development psychology training with student teams, participating in a project course at university, and compare their group effectiveness score to their agility usage over time in a longitudinal design. Se...

The agile approach to projects focuses more on close-knit teams than traditional waterfall projects, which means that aspects of group maturity become even more important. This psychological aspect is not much researched in connection to the building of an "agile team." The purpose of this study is to investigate how building agile teams is connect...

There is a diversity of models explaining organizational culture and how these complex aspects can be addressed in connection to organizational change efforts. This workshop paper claims that models already exist for dealing with the cultural change that an agile transition is in the software engineering context. Instead of realizing this again thr...

Many tools have been created for measuring the agility of software teams, thus creating a saturation in the field. Three agile measurement tools were selected in order to validate whether they yield similar results. The surveys of the tools were given to teams in Company A (\(N=30\)). The questions were grouped into agile practices which were check...

In this paper we describe the usefulness of statistical validation techniques for human factors survey research. We need to investigate a diversity of validity aspects when creating metrics in human factors research, and we argue that the statistical tests used in other fields to get support for reliability and construct validity in surveys, should...

The focus on psychology has increased within software engineering due to the project management innovation "agile development processes ". The agile methods do not explicitly consider group development aspects; they simply assume what is described in group psychology as mature groups. This study was conducted with 45 employees and their twelve mana...

Agile Development has now become a well-known approach to collaboration in professional work life. Both researchers and practitioners want validated tools to measure agility. This study sets out to validate an agile maturity measurement model with statistical tests and empirical data. First, a pretest was conducted as a case study including a surve...

There are studies showing what happens if agile teams are introduced into a non-agile organization, e.g. Higher overhead costs and the necessity of an understanding of agile methods even outside the teams. This case study shows an example of work motivational aspects that might surface when an agile team exists in the middle of a more traditional s...