Abstract
Context: Many agile software development teams deal with blockers that prevent them from working efficiently and achieving their (sprint) goals. There is few guidance concerning impediment management, only that you have to collect impediments and specify them in the impediments backlog. Therefore, many teams developed individual solutions to approach impediments. Objective: This paper should help to understand how agile teams identify, document and solve impediments in practice. Method: Seven semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with agile practitioners from German companies. Results: An overview of different ways teams might handle their impediments is provided. Based on the results, an initial model of the impediment management process is proposed. Conclusion: The results of this study support practitioners when defining or improving the way they deal with impediments.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
VersionOne & Collabnet: 14th State of Agile Report (2020). https://explore.digital.ai/state-of-agile/14th-annual-state-of-agile-report. Accessed 10 July 2020
Sutherland, J., Schwaber, K.: The Scrum Guide. The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the GAME. Scrum.org (2013)
Manifesto for Agile Software Development (2020). www.agilemanifesto.org. Accessed 10 July 2020
Theobald, S., Diebold, P.: Interface problems of agile in a non-agile environment. In: Garbajosa, J., Wang, X., Aguiar, A. (eds.) XP 2018. LNBIP, vol. 314, pp. 123–130. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91602-6_8
Diebold, P., Ostberg, J.-P., Wagner, S., Zendler, U.: What do practitioners vary in using scrum? In: Lassenius, C., Dingsøyr, T., Paasivaara, M. (eds.) XP 2015. LNBIP, vol. 212, pp. 40–51. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18612-2_4
Guckenbiehl, P.: Impediment Management in der Praxis agiler Softwareentwicklung. HS KL, Zweibrücken (2020)
Wiklund, K., Sundmark, D., Eldh, S., Lundqvist, K.: Impediments in agile software development: an empirical investigation. In: Heidrich, J., Oivo, M., Jedlitschka, A., Baldassarre, M.T. (eds.) PROFES 2013. LNCS, vol. 7983, pp. 35–49. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39259-7_6
Power, K., Conboy, K.: Impediments to flow: rethinking the lean concept of ‘waste’ in modern software development. In: Cantone, G., Marchesi, M. (eds.) XP 2014. LNBIP, vol. 179, pp. 203–217. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06862-6_14
Power, K.: Impediment impact diagrams – understanding the impact of impediments in agile teams and organizations. In: Proceedings of the Agile Conference 2014, Kissimmee, pp. 41–51 (2014)
Lárusdóttir, M.K., Cajander, Å., Simader, M.: Continuous improvement in agile development practice. In: Sauer, S., Bogdan, C., Forbrig, P., Bernhaupt, R., Winckler, M. (eds.) HCSE 2014. LNCS, vol. 8742, pp. 57–72. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44811-3_4
Carroll, N., O’Connor, M., Edison, H.: The identification and classification of impediments in software flow. In: Proceedings of the AMCIS 2018, New Orleans, pp. 1–10 (2018)
Alahyari, H., Gorschek, T., Svensson, R.: An exploratory study of waste in software development organizations using agile or lean approaches – a multiple case study at 14 organizations. Inf. Softw. Technol. 105, 78–94 (2018)
Power, K.: Improving Flow in Large Software Product Development Organizations – A Sensemaking and Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective. NUI Galway, Galway (2019)
Theobald, S., Schmitt, A., Diebold, P.: Comparing scaling agile frameworks based on underlying practices. In: Hoda, R. (ed.) XP 2019. LNBIP, vol. 364, pp. 88–96. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30126-2_11
Acknowledgments
This research is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of a Software Campus project (01IS17047). We would like to thank all participants of our interview study, and Sonnhild Namingha for proofreading this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Guckenbiehl, P., Theobald, S. (2020). Impediment Management of Agile Software Development Teams. In: Morisio, M., Torchiano, M., Jedlitschka, A. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12562. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64148-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64148-1_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-64147-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-64148-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)