Context.

A widely adopted methodology, agile software development provides enhanced flexibility to actively adjust a project scope. In agile teams, particularly in distributed environment, developers interact, manage requirements knowledge, and coordinate primarily in online collaboration tools. Developer conversations become invaluable sources to track and understand developers’ interactions around implementation of requirements, as well as the progress of implementation relative to the project scope and the planned iterations in agile projects. Although extensive research around iteration planning exists, there is a lack of research that leverages developer conversation data to understand delays in implementing planned requirements in agile projects.

Objective.

By using developer conversations in a large agile project at IBM, this work aims to analyze conversation in work items (WIs) that are delayed and derive patterns that suggest reasons for delay in the project.

Method.

We conducted a case study of the IBM Jazz project, and used thematic analysis to code the developer conversations as time-series, and cluster analysis to identify patterns that differentiated the evolution of discussions in WIs that were late vs. not late in the project.

Results.

We identified six main patterns of WI delay. Through semantic analysis of developer conversations within particular clusters we were able to explain the reasons for delays in each pattern. In comparison to non-late WIs, we find that the major reason for delay is a lack of frequent communication associated with a poor project management of WIs. Similarly, non-late tasks more often delegate to children tasks to accelerate the implementation of requirements, in addition to processing requests quickly to resolve bottlenecks in implementation.

Conclusion.

Our study complements existing research in bringing evidence that developer conversations are a useful resource that can highlight delays in requirement implementation, as well as recommend patterns in the dynamics of developers interactions relevant to such delays.

中文翻译：

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延迟的原型：对IBM Jazz中有关延迟工作项的在线开发人员对话的分析

上下文。

敏捷软件开发是一种广泛采用的方法，为主动调整项目范围提供了增强的灵活性。在敏捷团队中，尤其是在分布式环境中，开发人员可以交互，管理需求知识并主要在在线协作工具中进行协调。开发人员对话成为跟踪和理解开发人员围绕需求实现的交互以及与项目范围和敏捷项目中计划的迭代相关的实现进度的宝贵资源。尽管围绕迭代计划进行了广泛的研究，但是仍然缺乏利用开发人员对话数据来了解敏捷项目中实现计划需求的延迟的研究。

目的。

通过在IBM的一个大型敏捷项目中使用开发人员对话，这项工作旨在分析工作项（WI）中被延迟的对话，并得出暗示该项目延迟原因的模式。

方法。

我们对IBM Jazz项目进行了案例研究，并使用主题分析将开发人员的对话编码为时间序列，并使用聚类分析来确定模式，以区分项目中迟到与不迟到的WI中讨论的发展。

结果。

我们确定了WI延迟的六个主要模式。通过对特定集群中开发人员对话的语义分析，我们能够解释每种模式出现延迟的原因。与非晚期WI相比，我们发现延迟的主要原因是缺乏与WI的项目管理不佳相关的频繁沟通。同样，非后期任务除快速处理请求以解决实施中的瓶颈外，更常委派给子任务以加速需求的实施。

结论。

我们的研究对现有研究进行了补充，以提供证据证明开发者对话是一种有用的资源，可以突出需求执行中的延迟，并建议与此类延迟相关的开发者交互动态中的模式。