4.6 The Main Interview
4.6.1 The Study’s Participants
resemble a conversational partnership that the researcher establishes with the interviewee (whom Rubin and Rubin (2005, p. 6) refer to as a conversational partner). The probes and follow-up questions that were dynamically generated and converged to a finite set is highlighted in the questionnaire (see Appendix A).
agile methodology in one of the 4 of the major banking institutions in South Africa.
Coupled with this initial contact and an internet based search for software development organisations that subscribed to the use of agile software development methodology, a total of 36 prospective participants were identified for the study. Each of the participants was contacted telephonically to explain the objectives of the study and to determine their willingness to participate. The objectives of the study were also explained via an email. The consent form as well as the pre-questionnaire was sent as an attachment. Eighteen of the prospective respondents replied via return email with responses to the questions asked in the pre-questionnaire. From this group, only 12 of the respondents indicated their willingness to participate in the interview session. The interview sessions were scheduled to take place in the time period from October 2016 to January 2017. Due to the unavailability of many of the respondents during the planned period, the bulk of the interviews were conducted from December 2016 to April 2017. During this ‘core data collection’ period, many of the interviewees suggested the names of colleagues who would add value to the knowledge on agile software development, based on their experience and expertise in that domain. This iterative approach to sampling is usually recommended in a qualitative study to optimise the prospect of obtaining theoretical saturation, thereby enabling the researcher to make valid conclusions (Huberman et al., 2013). A final set of 16 interviews were conducted.
The interview schedule is presented in Appendix C. The interview schedule includes the profile of the interviewees with regards to the type of organisation that they currently worked in, the capacity in which they have served in the organisation as well as the total number of years of experience in the domain of software development and the number of years of involvement with projects that implemented an agile software development methodology.
A significant observation that was made during the researcher’s engagement with the subjects of the study is the intensive effort that the banking sector in South Africa has made to invoke strategies that enable an improvement in the software development process. A major focus of this effort has been in the domain of agile software development methodology. The researcher was provided
with an opportunity to meet with many of the members of the software development teams in the banking sector who were being ‘groomed’ by agile coaches on various aspects of agile methodology. The ‘richness’ of the dialog with software practitioners in the banking sector is the main reason for the prominence of representatives from this sector in the sample selected for the analysis (illustrated in Figure 4.2).
As can be observed in Figure 4.2, the main business domain represented by the interviewees is the banking sector. A total of 8 interviews were done with software practitioners from all 4 of the largest banks in South Africa, constituting 50% of the total number of interviews that were conducted. Four interviews were held with software practitioners who belong to organisations that provide a bespoke software solution service to various organisations in South Africa. The remaining 4 interviews (labelled as ‘other’ in Figure 4.2) were conducted with practitioners from the agricultural sector, the motor industry, the petro-chemical industry and a national logistics organisation. In each of these organisations, agile methodology has been used extensively for software development thereby enabling an informed response by the software practitioners of the value of agile methodology from a phenomenological perspective.
Figure 4.2: Type of Organisation Represented by the Interviewees
An important aspect of a phenomenological study is that the experience of the respondents in the domain of inquiry is crucial to ensure that the interaction between the researcher and the respondent yields meaningful data. As discussed previously, the 2 compulsory minimum requirements were that the respondents must have at least 5 years of experience in the general domain of software development, in the capacity of a software developer or manager, as well as 2 years of experience of working in an agile software development environment. The respondents for the current study were well within these established parameters as is verified in the subsequent narrative.
From the total of 16 interviews that were analysed, the number of years of experience of the interviewees in the professional software sector has a range from 5 to 30 years. One of the respondents had 30 years of software development and management experience. However, the data value of 30 was recognised as an outlier (illustrated in the Box and Whisker plot of Figure 4.3) and removed from the computation of the measures of central tendency for the number of years of experience that the respondents have in general software development.
The average number of years of experience of the interviewees in general software development is 8.8. As illustrated in Figure 4.4, the number of years of experience
Figure 4.3: Box and Whisker Plot showing Outlier for Years of Experience
in general software development for the bulk of the interviewees is in the range from 7 to 10 years.
In terms of the number of years of experience in the use of agile software development methodology (ASDM), the range is from 3 to 9 years with an average of 5.9 years and a median of 6 years. The mode with regards to experience in the use of ASDM is 5 years and as illustrated in Figure 4.5, the number of years of experience for the bulk of the interviewees is in the range from 5 to 8 years.
Figure 4.5: Number of Years of Experience in Using Agile Methodology It should be noted that a large number of respondents (as indicated in the full
Figure 4.4: Number of Years of Experience as a Software Practitioner
and later progressed to roles as business managers, systems analysts and in some instances, solution architects. As part of their experience, they have all been involved in the development of software systems that made use of the traditional waterfall methodology, agile methodology and a hybrid of agile methodology and waterfall methodology. Hence the sample used in the current study had all the attributes to provide a multi-dimensional perspective on their experiences in software development and agile methodology in particular.
It should also be noted that the interview schedule in Appendix C makes reference to 20 interviews that were recorded as part of the study’s data corpus.
As mentioned previously, 16 of the interviews were transcribed and analysed as part of the study’s qualitative analysis phase. The role played by the remaining 4 interviews is explained below.
The first interview conducted for the study was done with IBM Research Fellow, Grady Booch. The objective of this interview was to obtain a focus area for the study from a highly respected expert in the domain of software engineering;
Three interviews were conducted with software engineers who have expertise in the domain of agile methodology and the operations phase of the development lifecycle (the DevOps dimension). These interviewees were well-placed individuals who were invited by the researcher to verify the strengths, weaknesses and ideas on how agile methodology could be integrated with the operations phase.
These 3 interviews were conducted after the main set of exploratory interviews were conducted and were included as part of the synthesis phase of the qualitative data analysis.