Using an ontology for systematic practice adoption in agile methods: Expert system and practitioners-based validation. (1st June 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kiv, Soreangsey; Heng, Samedi; Wautelet, Yves; Poelmans, Stephan; Kolp, Manuel
• Is Part Of: Expert systems with applications. Volume 195(2022)
• Publication Date: 2022-06-01
• Subjects: Agile practice -- Ontology -- Knowledge representation -- Real case study -- Systematic literature review -- Survey; Expert systems (Computer science) -- Periodicals; Systèmes experts (Informatique) -- Périodiques; Electronic journals; 006.33
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2022.116520
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0957-4174

Abstract

Abstract: As many software development teams have started to adopt agile methods, a vast amount of valuable experiences have been reported on in both academic and industrial knowledge bases. This information has been used through various approaches to guide and help practitioners finding suitable practices for their software development projects. Nevertheless, not many of these approaches could gather the available experiences to make them systematically reusable and help practitioners understanding agile practices in depth. To the best of our knowledge, only one ontology has been created to solve this problem; some limitations related to its quality and usability make it nevertheless unqualified to serve the intended purpose. The aim of this paper is to build an expert system (i.e. an evidence-based tool) to ease agile practices adoption by efficiently and effectively providing information on them. Firstly, we improve the concepts and relationships in the aforementioned ontology and theoretically validate it using a large data-set of agile practices adoption experiences collected through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Secondly, we develop a supporting tool having a friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) allowing to use the ontology as a concrete agile practice knowledge provider. Finally, we empirically validate the enhanced ontology and evaluate the supporting tool using a survey with agile experts. Our supporting tool can help practitioners to decide what practice to adopt, how to adopt it, how to solve practical issues, etc. The ontology and the tool materialize our contribution to the field of systematic agile practices adoption. Highlights: Successful agile practice adoption requires an in depth understanding of its content. Existing reports on agile practice adoption experiences are essentially unexploitable. An ontology is used as an efficient solution to recycle practices adoption experience. A corpus-based approach and a survey are used for validating the ontology. An expert system supports practitioners querying knowledge on practice adoption.