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Foundations of Agile Decision Making from Agile Mentors and Developers

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Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering (XP 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 4044))

Abstract

There are few studies of how software developers make decisions in software design and none that places agile in the context of these decision making processes. In this paper, we present results of interviewing agile software developers and mentors to determine how design decision making aligns with rational decision making or naturalistic decision making. We present results of twelve case studies evaluating how agile professionals make design decisions, comparing mentor perspectives to developer perspectives. We describe our interview technique, content analysis used to analyze interview transcripts, and the interpretation of our results, to answer the question: how do agile designers make design decisions? Our results show that naturalistic decision making dominates design decision making but is supported by rational decision making.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, AB, CAN

    Carmen Zannier & Frank Maurer

Authors
  1. Carmen Zannier
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  2. Frank Maurer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. VTT Electronics, Oulu, Finland

    Pekka Abrahamsson

  2. FlossLab s.r.l., viale Elmas, 142, 09122, Cagliari, Italy

    Michele Marchesi

  3. Center for Applied Software Engineering Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Piazza Domenicani 1, 39100, Bolzano-Bozen, Italy

    Giancarlo Succi

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Zannier, C., Maurer, F. (2006). Foundations of Agile Decision Making from Agile Mentors and Developers. In: Abrahamsson, P., Marchesi, M., Succi, G. (eds) Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering. XP 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4044. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11774129_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11774129_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-35094-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-35095-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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