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Why the Development Outcome Does Not Meet the Product Owners’ Expectations?

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Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming (XP 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 212))

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Abstract

Many software development projects fail due to problems in requirements, scope, and collaboration. This paper presents a case study of the mismatch between the expectations of Product Owners and the outcome of the development in a large distributed Scrum organization. The data was collected in retrospective meetings involving a team of Product Owners and two software development teams. A focused root cause analysis of the problem “Why the expectations of Product Owners do not meet the outcome of development teams?” was conducted. The analysis aimed at explaining why the problem occurred and how the causes were related to one another. The outcomes were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our results illustrate the challenges of implementing the Product Owner role in the context of complex, high-variability requirements and distributed development. We highlight the importance of true collaboration, effective requirements specification activities, and sufficient resources for the Product Owner role.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Aalto University School of Science, P.O. BOX 15400, 00076, Aalto, Finland

    Timo O.A. Lehtinen, Risto Virtanen, Ville T. Heikkilä & Juha Itkonen

Authors
  1. Timo O.A. Lehtinen
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  2. Risto Virtanen
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  3. Ville T. Heikkilä
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  4. Juha Itkonen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Timo O.A. Lehtinen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

    Casper Lassenius

  2. SINTEF, Trondheim, Norway

    Torgeir Dingsøyr

  3. Aalto University, Aalto, Finland

    Maria Paasivaara

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Lehtinen, T.O., Virtanen, R., Heikkilä, V.T., Itkonen, J. (2015). Why the Development Outcome Does Not Meet the Product Owners’ Expectations?. In: Lassenius, C., Dingsøyr, T., Paasivaara, M. (eds) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. XP 2015. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 212. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18612-2_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18612-2_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-18611-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-18612-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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