199,490 research outputs found
Agile methods for agile universities
We explore a term, Agile, that is being used in various workplace settings, including the management of universities. The term may have several related but slightly different meanings. Agile is often used in the context of facilitating more creative problem-solving and advocating for the adoption, design, tailoring and continual updating of more innovative organizational processes. We consider a particular set of meanings of the term from the world of software development. Agile methods were created to address certain problems with the software development process. Many of those problems have interesting analogues in the context of universities, so a reflection on agile methods may be a useful heuristic for generating ideas for enabling universities to be more creative
Historical roots of Agile methods: where did “Agile thinking” come from?
The appearance of Agile methods has been the most noticeable change to software process thinking in the last fifteen years [16], but in fact many of the “Agile ideas” have been around since 70’s or even before. Many studies and reviews have been conducted about Agile methods which ascribe their emergence as a reaction against traditional methods. In this paper, we argue that although Agile methods are new as a whole, they have strong roots in the history of software engineering. In addition to the iterative and incremental approaches that have been in use since 1957 [21], people who criticised the traditional methods suggested alternative approaches which were actually Agile ideas such as the response to change, customer involvement, and working software over documentation. The authors of this paper believe that education about the history of Agile thinking will help to develop better understanding as well as promoting the use of Agile methods. We therefore present and discuss the reasons behind the development and introduction of Agile methods, as a reaction to traditional methods, as a result of people's experience, and in particular focusing on reusing ideas from histor
Open Source Tools to Support Teaching Agile Software Development
Learning agile software development methodologies are important due to the popularity of agility in software industry. Agile software development has several practices and each practice needs specific tools to work with. Fortunately, there are plenty of open source tools to support working with the agile practices. However, each tool is a separate tool and there is no information about the interrelation of those open source tools. In this paper we propose a set of open source tools to support agile software development course. We start from identifying the principles and practices of agile software development and continue with examining open source tools that fit with agile practices. The relationship between the open source tools is also determined, based on their functionalities
Non-Technical Individual Skills are Weakly Connected to the Maturity of Agile Practices
Context: Existing knowledge in agile software development suggests that
individual competency (e.g. skills) is a critical success factor for agile
projects. While assuming that technical skills are important for every kind of
software development project, many researchers suggest that non-technical
individual skills are especially important in agile software development.
Objective: In this paper, we investigate whether non-technical individual
skills can predict the use of agile practices. Method: Through creating a set
of multiple linear regression models using a total of 113 participants from
agile teams in six software development organizations from The Netherlands and
Brazil, we analyzed the predictive power of non-technical individual skills in
relation to agile practices. Results: The results show that there is
surprisingly low power in using non-technical individual skills to predict
(i.e. explain variance in) the mature use of agile practices in software
development. Conclusions: Therefore, we conclude that looking at non-technical
individual skills is not the optimal level of analysis when trying to
understand, and explain, the mature use of agile practices in the software
development context. We argue that it is more important to focus on the
non-technical skills as a team-level capacity instead of assuring that all
individuals possess such skills when understanding the use of the agile
practices.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur
Agile values and their implementation in practice
Today agile approaches are often used for the
development of digital products. Since their development in
the 90s, Agile Methodologies, such as Scrum and Extreme
Programming, have evolved. Team collaboration is strongly
influenced by the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto. The
values and principles described in the Agile Manifesto support
the optimization of the development process. In this article, the
current operation is analyzed in Agile Product Development
Processes. Both, the cooperation in the project team and the
understanding of the roles and tasks will be analyzed. The results
are set in relation to the best practices of Agile Methodologies. A
quantitative questionnaire related to best practices in Agile Product
Development was developed. The study was carried out with
175 interdisciplinary participants from the IT industry. For the
evaluation of the results, 93 participants were included who have
expertise in the subject area Agile Methodologies. On one hand,
it is shown that the collaborative development of product-related
ideas brings benefits. On the other hand, it is investigated which
effect a good understanding of the product has on decisions made
during the implementation. Furthermore, the skillset of product
managers, the use of pair programming, and the advantages of
cross-functional teams are analyzed.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2013-46928-C3-3-
Agile in Public Administration: Oxymoron or reality? An experience report
In the last 10 years, Agile methods and practices have emerged as an
alternative for software development. Different "flavors" of Agile have
appeared ranging from project management to tests organization. These
approaches have being gaining popularity and involve now a solid option for
organizations developing software, but what about Public Administrations? Is
Agile a suitable option for developing software in Public Administrations?
Even if Public Administrations have been traditionally regarded as changeresistant,
Agile approach can also provide them with the benefits of quick
adaptation and frequent value delivery.
This paper presents the results of two different projects, which use an Agile
framework based on Scrum, developed by a Spanish Public Administration.
Additionally, after considering the obtained results, it takes out some relevant
learned lessons on the suitability of applying Agile approaches to Public
Administration environments.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2010-20057-C03-02Junta de Andalucía TIC-578
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