TY - GEN
T1 - A Novel Technique to Assess Agile Systems for Stability
AU - Healy, Robert
AU - Dey, Tapajit
AU - Conboy, Kieran
AU - Fitzgerald, Brian
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - Agile systems, like the Kanban and Scrum frameworks, are built on assumptions of sustainability and stability, however, there is little empirical evidence on whether such systems are stable in practice or not. Therefore, in this study we aim to inspect the stability of Agile systems by leveraging the concept of stability described in Queueing Theory. We define a novel metric, the Stability Metric, as a way of assessing queueing systems, especially Agile systems. We inspect 926 Jira projects in 14 organizations with over 1.6 million product backlog items using this metric. The analysis showed that 72.89% of these Jira projects were not stable and stable systems, on average, had product backlog sizes 10 times shorter than unstable ones. These results suggest that while the goal of Agile is to create a sustainable, stable way of working, this is not guaranteed, and a better understanding of systems and queues may be required to help design, create, coach, and maintain optimal Agile systems.
AB - Agile systems, like the Kanban and Scrum frameworks, are built on assumptions of sustainability and stability, however, there is little empirical evidence on whether such systems are stable in practice or not. Therefore, in this study we aim to inspect the stability of Agile systems by leveraging the concept of stability described in Queueing Theory. We define a novel metric, the Stability Metric, as a way of assessing queueing systems, especially Agile systems. We inspect 926 Jira projects in 14 organizations with over 1.6 million product backlog items using this metric. The analysis showed that 72.89% of these Jira projects were not stable and stable systems, on average, had product backlog sizes 10 times shorter than unstable ones. These results suggest that while the goal of Agile is to create a sustainable, stable way of working, this is not guaranteed, and a better understanding of systems and queues may be required to help design, create, coach, and maintain optimal Agile systems.
KW - Agile
KW - Backlogs
KW - Jira
KW - Queueing Theory
KW - Stability
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85161132057&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-33976-9_2
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-33976-9_2
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85161132057
SN - 9783031339752
T3 - Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing
SP - 20
EP - 33
BT - Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming - 24th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2023, Proceedings
A2 - Stettina, Christoph J.
A2 - Garbajosa, Juan
A2 - Kruchten, Philippe
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
T2 - 24th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2023
Y2 - 13 June 2023 through 16 June 2023
ER -