Information needs and presentation in agile software development

Context: Agile software companies applying the DevOps approach require collaboration and information sharing between practitioners in various roles to produce value. Adopting new development practices affects how practitioners collaborate, requiring companies to form a closer connection between business strategy and software development. However, the types of information management, sales, and development needed to plan, evaluate features, and reconcile their expectations with each other need to be clarified. Objective: To support practitioners in collaborating and realizing changes to their practices, we investigated what information is needed and how it should be represented to support different stakeholders in their tasks. Compared to earlier research, we adopted a holistic approach - by including practitioners throughout the development process - to better understand the information needs from a broader viewpoint.Method: We conducted six workshops and 12 semi-structured interviews at three Finnish small and mediumsized enterprises from different software domains. Thematic analysis was used to identify information-related issues and information and visualization needs for daily tasks. Three themes were constructed as the result of our analysis.Results: Visual information representation catalyzes stakeholder discussion, and supporting information exchange between stakeholder groups is vital for efficient collaboration in software product development. Additionally, user-centric data collection practices are needed to understand how software products are used and to support practitioners' daily information needs. We also found that a passive way of representing information, such as a dashboard that would disturb practitioners only when attention is needed, was preferred for daily information needs.Conclusion: The software engineering community should consider reviewing the information needs of practitioners from a more holistic view to better understand how tooling support can benefit information exchange between stakeholder groups when making product development decisions and how those tools should be built to accommodate different stakeholder views.

Automated summary

In agile software companies applying the DevOps approach, collaboration and information sharing between practitioners in various roles is required to produce value. This study aims to identify the information needs and representation methods to support practitioners in their collaboration and practice changes. The findings highlight the importance of visual information representation and user-centric data collection practices in efficient collaboration and meeting daily information needs.