[AISWorld] HICSS 49 CFP: Agile Development Minitrack: Submission System NOW AVAILABLE

[John Tripp]

We invite you to submit manuscripts for the Agile and Lean: Organizations,
Products and Development mini-track, to be held at HICSS-49 on January 5–8,
2015 at Kauai, Hawaii. We welcome papers from academics, practitioners and
(even better) academic-practitioner collaborators. Co-chairs are Daniel R
Greening (Senex Rex), John Tripp (Baylor University) and Jeff Sutherland
(Scrum, Inc.).



The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences(HICSS) provides a
great mix of academics, industrialists and consultants studying many
applications and aspects of system science. Now in its 49th year, HICSS is
one of the longest-standing continuously running scientific conferences.
HICSS is an IEEE Computer Society sponsored conference. HICSS papers are in
the top 2% of conference papers downloaded from IEEE.



Topics

We seek research papers and experience reports that explore agile
development, lean product management and agile/lean organizations. What
evidence-based guidance can we provide to product leaders, managers and
developers to help motivate, create and sustain better agile/lean behaviors
and more profitable outcomes? How can we incorporate product design,
architecture, engineering, risk reduction, budgeting and offshoring into
agile/lean while preserving experimentation and adaptation? What common
behaviors do we see in agile (including Scrum, Kanban, Extreme
Programming/XP, etc.) teams and lean product management (including Lean
Startup, Customer Development, etc.) and how do those behaviors affect
outcomes? How do organizations and cultures restructure to support these
philosophies and when they do not restructure, what happens? Which metrics
help enterprises, teams and individuals adapt and improve?



Deadlines

March 15, 2015. Submission system available

Follow author instructions found on https://precisionconference.com/~hicss
select “Software Technology” track and “Agile and Lean” mini-track.



May 15, 2015. Early review (optional) deadline

Abstract and manuscript submissions received before May 15, 2015 will
receive early guidance to improve the likelihood of acceptance.



June 15, 2015. Submission deadline

Submit full manuscripts for review. Review is double blind; your submission
must omit author names, credentials and affiliation. Follow author
instructions found on https://precisionconference.com/~hicss select
“Software Technology” track and “Agile and Lean” mini-track.



Background

Agile product development rhythmically experiments with development
behavior to improve production. Agile is most often applied to software
development, and we expect some papers in this mini-track to discuss
software organizations and software engineering practices. However, we also
welcome papers that describe other types of organizational “production”,
such as business intelligence, management initiatives, manufacturing,
marketing, sales and finance.



Lean product management experiments with markets to improve revenue,
continually seeks to reduce waste, including waste due to producing
unprofitable products (recently popularized as “Lean Startup” or “Lean
Entrepreneurship”). Characteristics include: set-based design, A-B testing,
unmoderated user-experience testing, direct market experimentation,
customer validation and pivoting. Advocates claim lean product management
produces greater market satisfaction and customer engagement, earlier
discovery of hidden market opportunities, higher revenues and more
efficient use of development staff.



Experimentation characterizes both approaches: they identify leading
indicators of progress (velocity, reach, engagement, loyalty, revenue,
etc.), consider changes to process or product, construct hypotheses, and
incorporate feedback loops to confirm or invalidate the hypotheses, perform
production or market experiments, and rapidly adapt to discoveries.



These approaches claim superiority in new product development over
traditional approaches (such as “waterfall management”) that fail to test
development and market assumptions in long-range plans.



Agile and lean approaches challenge organizations large and small. People
typically conflate small failures (learning) with large failures
(organizational threats), assume that innovation means taking long-range
untested risk, and establish and protect budgets with many baked-in
production and market assumptions. These cultural realities interfere with
agility and real innovation.



As a result, companies often invest enormous amounts of money in incomplete
or abandoned agile transformations. What can organizations do to improve
agile uptake? How do we know that the organization is improving? How can
organizations diagnose problems without motivating gaming? What types of
people are more likely to thrive in agile and lean organizations, and what
roles should they take? What hiring practices result in better candidates?
What training programs produce better results? What coaching structures
work? How do we measure these activities?



Possible topics for the minitrack include but are not limited to:

-Empirical outcome comparisons in industrial settings: agile and non-agile,
remote and collocated, impact of different agile methods, etc.

-New frontiers in agile management – going beyond software development

-Forecasting, risk reduction, planning

-Agile organizations as rhythmic and recursive experimentation

-Exploring the fit between agile organizations and their environmental
context.

-Agile and Lean requirements engineering, dependency management and risk
management

-Conflict in agile organizations and agile development teams: what cultures
work and don’t work?

-What cultures and leadership characteristics lead to sustained agility?

-Evolution of agile organizations

-Case studies on agile management and experimentation, in atypical
situations

-New approaches to teams and teaming

-Impact of tool use on agile management

-New approaches to teaching and coaching agile organizations

-Lessons learned in agile management

-How do agile management and traditional management complement or conflict?


We look forward to receiving your submission, and seeing you at HICSS
January 5-8, 2016 in Kauai!


Dan Greening, John Tripp, Jeff Sutherland, Mini-Track Co-Chairs