Browsing by Author "Padmini, KVJ"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

item: Conference-Full-text
Adopting design thinking practices to satisfy customer expectations in agile practices: a case from Sri Lankan software development industry
(IEEE, 2018-05) Prasad, WMDR; Perera, GIUS; Padmini, KVJ; Bandara, HMND; Chathuranga, D
While the application of agile principles leads to better project success, some projects still fail due to insufficient understanding of client’s exact requirements. Agile teams have recently started adopting Design Thinking (DT) practices to better understand what is in customers’ mind. We explore suitable DT practices to satisfy customer expectations in agile teams using inductive reasoning. We first formulated a conceptual framework based on a literature review. We then conducted a set of interviews with fifteen domain experts from ten IT service organizations. Interview findings were then analyzed using the Straussian grounded theory. Customer journey, story mapping, prototypes, POC, and customer profiling were determined to be the most suitable methods to identify the needs of customers. Moreover, practicing human-centered approach through workshops, discussions, team communication, and end-user interaction through UAT were also identified to be effective. We further classified the best practices into five categories as customer’s real need identification, transforming customer’s real needs into pilot solutions, visualizing the pilot solution for customer feedback, idea generation for the pilot solution, and brainstorming. Based on these findings, we also derived a framework to achieve customer satisfaction through the adoption of DT in agile-base projects.
item: Conference-Full-text
Applying agile practices to avoid chaos in user acceptance testing: a case study
(IEEE, 2016-04) Padmini, KVJ; Perera, I; Bandara, HMND; Jayasekara, AGBP; Bandara, HMND; Amarasinghe, YWR
Agile practices have gained increasing popularity in Information Technology (IT), Education, Marketing, and Advertising industry, as it brings quality products into the market faster. Scrum, Lean Development, and Extreme Programming are the most commonly considered processes under the Agile umbrella. Scrum or scrum variants form a high performance, collaborative team to handle projects that are more complex. We examine the applicability of the scrum framework to a large-scale revenue management system for User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Industry believes integration and acceptance testing is not easy to perform within the scrum framework. Nevertheless, very little is explored about the acceptance testing in Agile practices. We fill this gap by empirically evaluating UAT of a complex, large-scale system (in a public sector organization) to showcase the applicability of scrum framework. While the initial UAT team consisted of 100 domain experts, no process was defined for the UAT. This made it easier to streamline the UAT into the scrum framework. Once the scrum framework was introduced significant improvements in the UAT team was experienced with improved morale, productivity, efficiency, and time to market while having a smooth flow.
item: Conference-Full-text
Challenges faced by agile testers: a case study
(IEEE, 2018-05) Padmini, KVJ; Kankanamge, PS; Bandara, HMND; Perera, GIUS; Chathuranga, D
In the agile framework developers and testers are part of a hyper-productive, self-organizing team. Testing scope changes when user stories are added, updated, or deleted. Moreover, test cases need to be re-written or update when user stories change or removed from the sprint, which wastes time and makes agile testers frustrated. Furthermore, the mini-waterfall model adopted within a sprint could develop unwanted stress in agile testers. Despite these challenges little seem to be understood about the challenges faced by agile testers. We fill this gap by closely studying the challenges faced by agile testers in a multinational IT services organization. We first set up a forum for agile testers to discuss their challenges, malpractices, and best practices. We then conducted an online survey based on the findings from the forum and literature review. Through this, we identified 15 challenges and best practices to overcome those 15 challenges. We further conducted a set of interviews with the subject matter expertise to identify a suitable set of solutions such as conducting retrospective in a fun and engaging way, managing story lifecycle using collaborative tools, setting up ground rules for geographically distributed teams, and introducing innovative sprints.
item: Conference-Abstract
R(P)Aban: A Software Process for Robotic Process Automation Projects
(2018-05) Padmini, KVJ; De Silva, O; Bandara, HMND; Perera, GIUS; Asanka, N; Narayana, M; Chathuranga, D
Advancement of the software industry and artificial intelligence made the way to Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Business processes with structured, rule-based and repetitive tasks that produce definitive outputs are candidates for automation using RPA. RPA improves accuracy and productivity while reducing cost. However, still the industry fails to identify a suitable RPA delivery approach and 30% - 50% of the RPA projects fail due to unmatched delivery approach. In this paper, we propose an RPA delivery approach named R(P)Aban. R(P)Aban is derived based on an extensive study of RPA implementations by a multinational, service-based organization. We identified the best fit RPA delivery approaches based on a set of interviews with the RPA implementation teams. The proposed framework could be used to eliminate RPA project failures, as well as improve the project performance while reducing the cost.
item: Conference-Full-text
Use of Software Metrics in Agile Software Development Process
(2015-08-14) Padmini, KVJ; Bandara, HMND; Perera, GIUS
While software metrics typically help to assess the status of a project, process, product, and resource use, the suitability of metrics in Agile Software Development (ASD) process is frequently questioned due to the overheads involved. Moreover, many established metrics used in the Traditional Software Development (TSD) process, cannot be directly applied to ASD due to its iterative and incremental development process that is willing to incorporate changes throughout. Nevertheless, very little is explored about the use and suitability of metrics in the context of ASD. We fill this gap by exploring metrics suitable for the ASD process, use of those metrics in practice, perceived benefits, and related tools. Our survey and interview based analysis of 24 development companies identified 10 metrics that can be beneficial to the ASD process, where their benefits outweigh the overheads involved.