Abstract
[Context and motivation] We consider a company where software development was previously a minor activity and today is a major activity with high priority and attention. Software is now developed according to Scrum, and the company can be seen as being in an agile transition. [Question/problem] What are the relevant specifics of this organization and which product owner behaviors appear to be valuable or problematic, respectively? [Principal ideas/results] A fear of disruption put the development teams under pressures that led to low efficiency in an interesting way. The introduction of an IT product owner to assist a business product owner reduced this effect, but a problematic power imbalance still remains. [Contribution] Not only do agile technical teams need feedback from their product owner, the product owner also needs meaningful, effective feedback from the teams. Our experience report shows how this can be improved by the introduction of an IT product owner when the organization otherwise has insufficient focus on certain important dynamics of software engineering.
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Notes
- 1.
The company is kept anonymous.
- 2.
Two additional IT product owners were hired shortly before the author left the project. This article describes the time with only one IT product owner.
- 3.
All data in this section is for work items created before August 1st, 2022. The data has been extracted from the historical user stories in Azure Devops.
- 4.
The state of the work items on August 1st, 2022.
- 5.
The state of the work items was extracted from Azure Devops on September 30th, 2022. Only work items created before August 1st, 2022 have been included.
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Mygind, L., Jørgensen, J.B., Prechelt, L. (2023). A Product Owner’s Navigation in Power Imbalance Between Business and IT: An Experience Report. In: Ferrari, A., Penzenstadler, B. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13975. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29786-1_24
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