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This book explores how agile development practices, in particular pair programming, code review and automated testing, help software development teams to perform better. Agile software engineering has become the standard software development paradigm over the last decade, and the insights provided here are taken from a large-scale survey of 80 professional software development teams working at SAP SE in Germany. In addition, the book introduces a novel measurement tool for assessing the performance of software development teams. No previous study has researched this topic with a similar data set comprising insights from more than 450 professional software engineers.

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Introduction.- Agile Software Development.- Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations.- Research Methodology.- Empirical Validation.- Discussion.- Conclusion.

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"The book´s interesting concepts and approach make it useful for a general computer science audience: practitioners in the computer industry as well as researchers in the area of software development. The book could be useful for students who are planning to work in companies that have a teamwork approach to software development. The topic is presented in a very good manner and the technical quality is high. The almost 300 references represent an extensive list of resources for further reading." (M. Ivanovic, Computing Reviews, computingreviews.com, June, 2016)

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Christoph Schmidt is an IT consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. From 2011-2014, he worked as a researcher in a joint research project of the Business School of the University of Mannheim and SAP SE. During this time, he conducted empirical studies on agile software engineering, software development team performance and large-scale software development projects. His study results were published in various international conferences including the International Conference on Information Systems and the IEEE International Conference of Software Engineering.

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