Authors: Binny M. Samuel, Ilkay Nehir Tanyel, Jan Recker, Roman Lukyanenko, Srinivas Datla
Tags: 2020
DevOp is a popular software development approach in industry. DevOps is considered an evolution of Agile, and its approach requires increased collaboration, cooperation, and communication among a truly cross-functional team of business users and IT roles while treating software as a product as opposed to a project. Given the need for multiple people to be in coordination for DevOps to be successful, shared mental models of the holistic nature of the software product are essential for all roles. One way that share mental models are developed is via representations. In Agile, user stories (short, natural language descriptions from a user-perspective of desired software features) are a popular representation for discovering software requirements, managing and structuring developer work, and delivering value to the users. User stories have also been shown to be effective in a DevOps context, however given the need for maintaining shared-understanding among a larger variety of roles, less is known about the benefit of incorporating graphical representation for promoting shared understanding. Specifically, there could be benefit from combining text representations, such as user stories, with graphical representations, such as BPMN diagrams, to facilitate understanding. In this work-in-progress, we plan to explore if and why representations, such as graphical conceptual models, foster shared mental models in DevOps teams. We focus on representations of business process as they are particularly salient among all roles of DevOps. To address this concern empirically, we plan to collect data via a case study methodology with semi-structured interviews from multiple projects at a large US based consulting firm that used different representations in both Agile and DevOps work.
Cite as:
Samuel B., Lukyanenko R., Recker J., Nehir I., T.S. Datla T.S., (2020). “Is a Story Enough? Evaluating the Case of Graphical Conceptual Models in DevOps Work,” in AIS SIGSAND, Virtually in West Palm Beach, FL, United States, May 22, 2020.
