pith. sign in

arxiv: 2605.21690 · v1 · pith:7NW2YNRNnew · submitted 2026-05-20 · 💻 cs.SE

The 2nd Workshop on Agile Practice & Research: A Summary and Call For Research

Karen Eilers , Michael Neumann , Eva-Maria Sch\"on , Mali Senapathi , Maria Rauschenberger , Tiago Silva da Silva This is my paper

Pith reviewed 2026-05-22 08:53 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.SE
keywords agile software developmentresearch-practice gapworkshop summaryopen scienceempirical researchtheory gaptransfer gap
0
0 comments X

The pith

Workshop participants propose four propositions to bridge agile research and practice gaps.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper summarizes discussions from the 2nd Agile Practice & Research Workshop, which focused on three persistent gaps between academic research and industrial practice in agile software development: the theory gap, the time gap, and the transfer gap. Through small group sessions, participants identified root causes and remedies, which the organizers synthesized into four propositions aimed at improving the research-practice intersection. These propositions include better scientific communication, closer alignment with industry needs, stronger incentives for collaboration, and integrating education into research. The paper then formulates three specific calls for research to address these issues, encouraging the community to adopt open science, raise empirical standards, and make contributions more explicitly valuable.

Core claim

The central claim is that addressing the theory, time, and transfer gaps in agile software development requires four key propositions: improving scientific communication, aligning research with emerging industrial needs, creating stronger incentives for sustained collaboration, and integrating educational approaches into research practice. From these, the workshop derives three calls for research: broader adoption of open science practices, higher empirical quality standards with stronger theoretical grounding, and more explicit value-oriented contributions.

What carries the argument

The structured small-group collaborative sessions at the workshop on the three identified gaps, followed by synthesis into propositions and research calls.

If this is right

  • Adopting open science practices would enhance transparency, reproducibility, and the building of cumulative evidence in agile research.
  • Higher empirical quality standards would lead to research with stronger theoretical grounding and more rigorous design.
  • Value-oriented contributions would clearly articulate practical and scientific relevance, improving the transfer of findings.
  • Overall, these changes would reduce the theory gap, time gap, and transfer gap between researchers and practitioners.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • Implementing these propositions could be tested in other software engineering subfields facing similar research-practice divides.
  • Long-term tracking of collaboration metrics might reveal whether the suggested incentives actually sustain partnerships.
  • Integrating these ideas into university curricula could accelerate the alignment of future researchers with industry needs.

Load-bearing premise

The small-group discussions at the workshop accurately identified the root causes of the gaps and that the synthesized propositions will serve as effective, generalizable remedies.

What would settle it

A follow-up empirical study measuring changes in the identified gaps after implementing the four propositions across multiple organizations would show no reduction in the gaps.

read the original abstract

Agile software development has been shaped by the interplay between academic research and industrial practice for over two decades, yet notable gaps persist between both domains. This paper focuses on three research-practice gaps: the theory gap, the time gap, and the transfer gap. To address these, the 2nd Agile Practice & Research Workshop was held at the International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP) 2026 in S\~ao Paulo, Brazil, bringing researchers and practitioners together to identify root causes and develop joint solutions. Building on two preceding sessions in which contributions of participants had been presented, participants engaged in a structured collaborative session, working in small groups on one of the three gaps and reflecting on possible causes and remedies. The organizers synthesized the results into four propositions for improving the research-practice intersection: (1) improving scientific communication, (2) aligning research more closely with emerging industrial needs, (3) creating stronger incentives for sustained collaboration, and (4) integrating educational approaches into research practice. From these, three calls for research were formulated: (a) broader adoption of open science practices for transparency, reproducibility, and cumulative evidence; (b) higher empirical quality standards through stronger theoretical grounding and rigorous design; and (c) more explicit, value-oriented contributions that clearly articulate their practical and scientific relevance. The paper offers both a summary of the workshop and a call to strengthen research-practice collaboration.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

1 major / 2 minor

Summary. The manuscript summarizes the 2nd Workshop on Agile Practice & Research held at XP 2026 in São Paulo. It identifies three persistent gaps (theory, time, and transfer) between agile research and industrial practice, describes a structured small-group discussion format used to explore root causes and remedies, and reports that the organizers synthesized participant outputs into four propositions for strengthening the research-practice intersection plus three derived calls for research on open science, empirical rigor, and value-oriented contributions.

Significance. If the reported synthesis accurately captures the workshop outcomes, the paper offers a community-oriented agenda that could help coordinate future efforts to reduce the identified gaps in agile software engineering. The explicit calls for research on open science practices, stronger theoretical grounding, and clearer practical relevance provide concrete directions that practitioners and researchers might adopt, though the absence of validation data limits the immediate generalizability of the propositions.

major comments (1)
  1. The central synthesis step is described only at a high level. The text states that 'the organizers synthesized the results into four propositions' but provides no account of the aggregation method, number of participants per group, raw discussion themes, or how individual group outputs were combined or prioritized. This traceability gap directly affects the credibility of the four propositions and the three calls for research that follow from them.
minor comments (2)
  1. The abstract contains the LaTeX fragment 'S~ao Paulo'; this should be rendered correctly as 'São Paulo' in the published version.
  2. The manuscript would benefit from a brief statement of participant selection criteria or total attendance to help readers gauge the breadth of the small-group inputs.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

1 responses · 0 unresolved

We are grateful to the referee for the encouraging summary and recommendation for minor revision. We respond to the major comment as follows.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: The central synthesis step is described only at a high level. The text states that 'the organizers synthesized the results into four propositions' but provides no account of the aggregation method, number of participants per group, raw discussion themes, or how individual group outputs were combined or prioritized. This traceability gap directly affects the credibility of the four propositions and the three calls for research that follow from them.

    Authors: We thank the referee for highlighting this issue. The manuscript provides a high-level overview of the workshop as it is primarily intended to summarize the event and issue a call for research. We recognize that additional details on the synthesis would strengthen the paper. In the revised version, we will include a more detailed account of the synthesis process, specifying the aggregation method (thematic synthesis by the organizers), the group composition, and the way outputs were prioritized and combined into the four propositions. We will also offer illustrative examples of the discussion themes. Full raw data from the discussions will not be provided, as the workshop was not designed as a data collection exercise for publication and to maintain the focus on the resulting propositions and calls. We believe this addresses the traceability concern while preserving the paper's scope. revision: partial

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity: descriptive workshop summary with no derivation chain

full rationale

The paper reports on a workshop by describing participant discussions on three gaps and stating that organizers synthesized outputs into four propositions and three calls for research. No equations, fitted parameters, self-citations as uniqueness theorems, or ansatzes appear. The synthesis step is presented as a direct outcome of the event without any reduction of claims to their own inputs by construction, making the document self-contained as an event summary.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 0 axioms · 0 invented entities

The report rests on the assumption that participant inputs from one workshop are sufficient to define root causes and remedies for field-wide gaps, with no additional evidence or external benchmarks supplied.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5802 in / 1084 out tokens · 34427 ms · 2026-05-22T08:53:14.308967+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Lean theorems connected to this paper

Citations machine-checked in the Pith Canon. Every link opens the source theorem in the public Lean library.

What do these tags mean?
matches
The paper's claim is directly supported by a theorem in the formal canon.
supports
The theorem supports part of the paper's argument, but the paper may add assumptions or extra steps.
extends
The paper goes beyond the formal theorem; the theorem is a base layer rather than the whole result.
uses
The paper appears to rely on the theorem as machinery.
contradicts
The paper's claim conflicts with a theorem or certificate in the canon.
unclear
Pith found a possible connection, but the passage is too broad, indirect, or ambiguous to say the theorem truly supports the claim.

Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

21 extracted references · 21 canonical work pages

  1. [1]

    Information Systems Journal32(1), 103–129 (2022)

    Baham, C., Hirschheim, R.: Issues, challenges, and a proposed theoretical core of agile software development research. Information Systems Journal32(1), 103–129 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12336

    work page doi:10.1111/isj.12336 2022

  2. [2]

    International Jour- nal of System Assurance Engineering and Management9, 323–334 (2018)

    Barroca, L., Sharp, H., Salah, D., Taylor, K., Gregory, P.: Bridging the gap between research and agile practice: an evolutionary model. International Jour- nal of System Assurance Engineering and Management9, 323–334 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13198-015-0355-5

    work page doi:10.1007/s13198-015-0355-5 2018

  3. [3]

    Beck, K., Beedle, M., van Bennekum, A., Cockburn, A., Cunningham, W., Fowler, M., Greening, J., Highsmith, J., Hunt, A., Jeffries, R., Kern, J., Marick, B., Martin, R., Mellor, S., Schwaber, K., Sutherland, J., Thomas, D.: Agile manifesto (2021), https://agilemanifesto.org/

    work page 2021

  4. [4]

    Journal of Information Technology38(3), 267–303 (2023)

    Carroll, N., Conboy, K., Wang, X.: From transformation to normalisation: An exploratory study of a large-scale agile transformation. Journal of Information Technology38(3), 267–303 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1177/02683962231164428

    work page doi:10.1177/02683962231164428 2023

  5. [5]

    In: Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming – Workshops

    Diebold, P.: Designing transfer-ready research artefacts for ways of working. In: Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming – Workshops. Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham (2026)

    work page 2026

  6. [6]

    IEEE Software36(2), 30–38 (2019)

    Dingsoeyr, T., Falessi, D., Power, K.: Agile development at scale: The next frontier. IEEE Software36(2), 30–38 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2018.2884884

    work page doi:10.1109/ms.2018.2884884 2019

  7. [7]

    Eilers, K., Neumann, M., Schön, E.M., Senapathi, M., Rauschenberger, M., da Silva, T.S.: Additional material to workshop agilepr at xp2026 (2025), https://bit.ly/xp2026-agilepr2 The 2nd Workshop on Agile Practice & Research 9

    work page 2025

  8. [8]

    Technological Forecasting and Social Change179, 121650 (2022)

    Eilers, K., Peters, C., Leimeister, J.M.: Why the agile mindset mat- ters. Technological Forecasting and Social Change179, 121650 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2022.121650

    work page doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2022.121650 2022

  9. [9]

    In: Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming – Workshops

    Geger, T., Rausch, A., Schiering, I., Stenzel, F., Wittek, S.: From education to evidence: A collaborative practice research platform for ai-integrated agile devel- opment. In: Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming – Workshops. Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham (2026)

    work page 2026

  10. [10]

    Lago, P., Runeson, P., Song, Q., Verdecchia, R.: Threats to validity in software engineering – hypocritical paper section or essential analysis? In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement. p. 314–324. ESEM ’24, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (2024). https://doi.org...

    work page doi:10.1145/3674805.3686691 2024

  11. [11]

    Review of Managerial Science19, 223 – 253 (2024)

    Magistretti, S., Trabucchi, D.: Agile-as-a-tool and agile-as-a-culture: a com- prehensive review of agile approaches adopting contingency and config- uration theories. Review of Managerial Science19, 223 – 253 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-024-00745-1

    work page doi:10.1007/s11846-024-00745-1 2024

  12. [12]

    Mendez, D., Graziotin, D., Wagner, S., Seibold, H.: Open Science in Soft- ware Engineering, pp. 477–501. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32489-6_17

    work page doi:10.1007/978-3-030-32489-6_17 2020

  13. [13]

    In: Peter, S., Kropp, M., Dingsøyr, T., Dillon, C., Diebold, P., Jain, D., Lunesu, M.I., Pinna, A

    Neumann, M., Schön, E.M., Senapathi, M., Rauschenberger, M., Silva da Silva, T.: Towards a closer collaboration between practice and research in agile software development workshop: A summary and research agenda. In: Peter, S., Kropp, M., Dingsøyr, T., Dillon, C., Diebold, P., Jain, D., Lunesu, M.I., Pinna, A. (eds.) Agile Processes in Software Engineerin...

    work page 2026

  14. [14]

    In: Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming

    Planötscher, D., Wang, X., Adil, M., Gregory, P., Larimian, S.: Human-ai collab- oration in software development activities: Perspectives of agile practitioners. In: Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. pp. 274–289. Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham (2026)

    work page 2026

  15. [15]

    In: Agile Pro- cesses in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming – Workshops

    Rook, A., Schreiter, B., Verwijs, C.: Closing research–practice gaps through action research: Empowering teams to strengthen their team effectiveness. In: Agile Pro- cesses in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming – Workshops. Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham (2026)

    work page 2026

  16. [16]

    Benchmarking as Empirical Standard in Software Engineering Research,

    Schmid, K.: If you want better empirical research, value your theory: On the im- portance of strong theories for progress in empirical software engineering research. In: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Evaluation and Assess- ment in Software Engineering. p. 359–364. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (2021). https:/...

    work page doi:10.1145/3463274.3463360 2021

  17. [17]

    ACM Trans

    Verwijs, C., Russo, D.: A theory of scrum team effectiveness. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.32(3) (Apr 2023). https://doi.org/10.1145/3571849

    work page doi:10.1145/3571849 2023

  18. [18]

    In: Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Pro- gramming – Workshops

    Walter, M.L., Nodari, A., Nunes, L., Pellenz, M.E., Scalabrin, E.E.: Aligning re- search and product development through multi-cycle design science research: An experience report. In: Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Pro- gramming – Workshops. Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham (2026)

    work page 2026

  19. [19]

    Journal of Systems and Software215, 112086 (2024)

    Winters, T.: Thoughts on applicability. Journal of Systems and Software215, 112086 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112086

    work page doi:10.1016/j.jss.2024.112086 2024

  20. [20]

    Woods,E.:Dearresearchersstep1:Findateamwithaproblem.JournalofSystems and Software222, 112318 (2025)

    work page 2025

  21. [21]

    In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Agile Software Development

    Yang, N., Wang, X., Zhang, Z., Siemon, D., Hyrynsalmi, S.: Core theories in agile software development. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Agile Software Development. pp. 3–18. Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham (2025)

    work page 2025