https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.00289.pdf
Agile software development is here to stay. Software engineering has been changed completely when it arrived and I cannot see how it will change back to waterfall.
Even the so-called post-agile methodologies are built on the same premises – collaboration within teams, empowerement, taking responsibility. Since we educate our future software engineers to be self-organizing, to take responsibility for their topics, projects and personal development, we will live with see a development in this direction.
At the same time, the tools that are needed to support these teams evolve. When I started working as a software engineer, Rational ClearCase was the go-to tool for version control. Now, my students don’t even recognize it. Well, Rational does not exist any more either – the last time I checked it was bought by IBM, no one knows what happens now.
In this paper, the authors take a look at how modern collaboration patterns look like and which tools are used there. They have observed that consolidation of tools (e.g. towards Slack) introduced very positive dynamics to the team. However, they also found that some automated notifications (e.g. from Jenkins) got lost in these new tools, which was not appreciated.
This case study is a longitudinal one, which is a great example of how a research team builds up a long-term collaboration, so important for modern academia and industry!
