INCENTIVES AND PERFORMANCE IN LARGE-SCALE LEAN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT An Agent-based Simulation Approach
The application of lean principles and agile project management techniques in the domain of large-scale software product development has gained tremendous momentum over the last decade. However, a simple transfer of good practices from the automotive industry combined with experiences from agile development on a team level is not possible due to fundamental differences stemming from the particular domain specifics – i.e. different types of products and components (material versus immaterial goods), knowledge work versus production systems as well as established business models. Especially team empowerment and the absence of a a hierarchical control on all levels impacts goal orientation and business optimization. In such settings, the design of adequate incentive schemes in order to align local optimization and opportunistic behavior with the overall strategy of the company is a crucial activity of central importance. Following an agent-based simulation approach with reinforcement learning, we (i) address the question of how information regarding backlog item dependencies is shared within and in between development teams on the product level subject to different incentive schemes. We (ii) compare different incentive schemes ranging from individual to team-based compensation. Based on our results, we are (iii) able to provide recommendations on how to design such incentives, what their effect is, and how to chose an adequate development structure to foster overall software product development flow by means of more economic decisions and thus resulting in a shorter time to market. For calibrating our simulation, we rely on practical experience from a very large software company piloting and implementing lean and agile for about three years.
Lean Agile Agent-based simulation Performance Incentive
Benjamin S. Blau Tobias Hildenbrand Matthias Armbruster Martin G. Fassunge Yongchun Xu Rico Knapper
SAP AG, Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16, Walldorf, Germany Research Center for Information Technology, Haid-und-Neu-Straβe 10-14, Karlsruhe, Germany
国际会议
13th International Conference on Enterprise Information System(第13届企业信息系统国际会议 ICEIS 2011)
北京
英文
1666-1677
2011-06-08（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）