42,174 research outputs found
A framework to assist in the assessment and tailoring of agile software development methods
University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.The innovative well-known agile methods offer many powerful agile software development practices and have received considerable attention from both practitioners as well as the research community. While many organizations are interested in adopting agile methods suitable to their local circumstances, there is little guidance available on how to do so. Organizations, especially on the large-scale, currently lack systematic support for adopting agile methods in their complex software development settings. To address this important issue, this research proposes an agile software solution framework (ASSF) to both assistance in the assessment of the capability of the organization or team and tailoring of agile method in order to support the systematic adoption and improvement of agility in both agile and, incidentally, non-agile software development environments - especially formal and large environments. The ASSF has been incrementally developed by the iterative application of build, review and adjust research activities, which is called here a “qualitative empirical” research method. The ASSF is intended for use by agile coaches and consultants as a comprehensive information guide. The ASSF has two main components: framework characteristics and lifecycle management. The framework characteristics component incorporates 10 main elements or attributes to describe the agile-hybrid software development methodologies: (1) people (2) process, (3) product, (4) tools, (5) agility, (6) abstraction, (7) business value, (8) policy (9) rules and (10) legal. The framework lifecycle management component specifies the stages, practices and resources in order to support the systematic adoption and improvement of agility. The framework stages refer to an agility adoption and improvement lifecycle, its practices refer to an agility adoption and improvement process, and its resources refer to models, templates and toolkit that can be used during the agility adoption and improvement process such as the contextual analysis model, a key agility indicators index, an agility adoption and improvement model, an agility adoption and improvement scorecard, and an agile toolkit. The components of this framework have been empirically analysed and reviewed by experts from industry as well as the research community, and updated based on the feedback received. The results of this research indicated that the proposed ASSF framework may be considered reasonable for a gradual successful transition or adoption of agile practices in formal and large software development environments
Towards comprehensive and disciplined change management strategy in agile transformation process.
Moving to agile through a well-defined strategy and framework is essential and this socio-technical process should be studied in deep. Advantages and earned values of agile approach in software industry motivate a lot of companies to try to use agile methods in their software product lines. Transformation process to agile methods is not easy and because of its nature, takes a long time. Since agile transformation needs organizational mutation, companies are faced with many challenges during this process. While several studies have been conducted for how to use agile methods, some other studies have focused on finding obstacles in agile adoption process. However, previous studies are valuable, but each of them has focused the change process from a particular perspective. In this study we discuss the dimensions of agile transformation process from a wider perspective. We will show that focusing on agile adoption is not the only master key for success in agile transformation process and we need to define an agile change management strategy for this organizational metamorphosis. This strategy should consider all aspects of changing approach and is underpinning of achievement in agile transformation process through substantive transformation experiences
Grounded theory for transition to and adoption of agile software development
Successful migration from traditional software development methods to Agile methods, as an organizational mutation, requires enough understanding of Agile transformation process and its related issues. Reviewing the literature revealed that software companies are struggling with many challenges during Agile transition process. However, there was no large-scale research study to elucidate various
aspects and dimensions of the transition process. Also, less effort has been devoted to investigate the whole transition process.
A Grounded Theory study with participation of 49 Agile experts from 13 different countries, mostly from USA and West Europe countries, and some from Asia and Australia, has been carried out to investigate the realities of Agile transformation.
Adopted research methodology provided a systematic approach to discover various aspect of the transformation through a multi-level data analysis including open coding, selective coding, and theoretical coding. Following a high disciplined
approach, various concepts and categories have been identified and finally, the main concern of the participants, known as core category, has been discovered as the theory of Agile transition and adoption comprising four major parts: (1) Agile Transition Key Prerequisites, (2) Agile Transition Challenges, (3) Agile Transition
Facilitators, and (4) Agile Transition and Adoption Framework.
This study discovered the most important prerequisites that software companies need to provide before starting their transition to Agile approach including having convincing reason for change, defining business values, initial training, etc. Software companies have to do a preparation phase to provide these prerequisites before starting Agile transformation. It also identified the major challenges that software teams and companies are facing with when moving to Agile, including negative human aspects, inadequate and dysfunctional training, technical challenges, etc.
These challenges have different roots and acts as impediments to the change. Also, this study discovered various change facilitators, including training, getting buy-in from practitioners, good coaching service, etc. Providing these facilitators help software teams to deal with the transformation challenges and increase chance of
success. Finally, it proposed a substantive framework for transitioning to Agile approach. The proposed framework has particular features, discipline, and activities which promise usefulness for Agile transformation process in software companies regardless of size and project type. This framework particularly aims to promote sustainable change and being Agile instead of doing Agile.
In general, this study developed the theory of Agile transition and adoption and discovered various aspects of the transformation. The findings of this study will serve to inform all software practitioners about transitioning to Agile software development
Exploring the benefits of combining DevOps and agile
The combined adoption of Agile and DevOps enables organizations to cope with the
increasing complexity of managing customer requirements and requests. It fosters the emergence
of a more collaborative and Agile framework to replace the waterfall models applied to software
development flow and the separation of development teams from operations. This study aims to
explore the benefits of the combined adoption of both models. A qualitative methodology is adopted
by including twelve case studies from international software engineering companies. Thematic
analysis is employed in identifying the benefits of the combined adoption of both paradigms. The
findings reveal the existence of twelve benefits, highlighting the automation of processes, improved
communication between teams, and reduction in time to market through process integration and
shorter software delivery cycles. Although they address different goals and challenges, the Agile and
DevOps paradigms when properly combined and aligned can offer relevant benefits to organizations.
The novelty of this study lies in the systematization of the benefits of the combined adoption of Agile
and DevOps considering multiple perspectives of the software engineering business environment.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Hybrid Agile Approach: Efficiently Blending Traditional and Agile Methodologies
Agile development, in its simplest form, offers a lightweight framework for helping teams, given a constantly evolving functional and technical landscape, maintain a focus on the rapid delivery of business value. Traditional project management focuses more on distinct and predefined sequential phases. It assumes that once requirements are fixed there won’t be any changes or additions in future. In today’s world however this is not true and development teams have to incorporate changes at later stages to be competitive. This is where agile methodologies have an edge over traditional methods. Agile can handle more complex and highly adaptable projects. However, organizations focusing heavily on traditional methodologies like waterfall may find completely switching to agile potentially risky. Agile methods may have these major potential risks like agile methods are easy to misunderstand, highly visible information can be threat to financially sensitive projects. Therefore, many companies fear the adoption of Agile because an enterprise-wide adoption of the methodology will conflict with the traditional Waterfall process and create conflict. Hybrid Agile approach will help the organizations transition to agile efficiently. This paper will focus on the analyzing the successful combination of agile and traditional methodology
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