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Impediment Management of Agile Software Development Teams

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Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12562))

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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.

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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.

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Correspondence to Sven Theobald .

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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

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64148-1_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-64148-1

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