An approach to reconcile the agile and CMMI contexts in product line development

Software product line approaches produce reusable platforms and architectures for products set developed by specific companies. These approaches are strategic in nature requiring coordination, discipline, commonality and communication. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) contains important guidelines for process improvement, and specifies "what" we must have into account to achieve the disciplined processes (among others things). On the other hand, the agile context is playing an increasingly important role in current software engineering practices, specifying "how" the software practices must be addressed to obtain agile processes. In this paper, we carry out a preliminary analysis for reconciling agility and maturity models in software product line domain, taking advantage of both.Postprint (published version

Case Study on Non-Functional Requirement Change Impact Traceability for Agile Software Development

Currently, it is crucial to develop a complex software on time. Agile software development methodologies provide methods to develop a system in term of time and cost-saving but it has been criticized for software quality management. In this paper, a case study is used to find out the need of NFR change impact traceability approach in most of Agile software methodology. This case study was conducted in an undergraduate course that trained the students on how to develop software using Agile process model.This case study has been conducted for 4 months in an undergraduate-level course, Application Development. The samples of this case study are among Year 3 undergraduate students. The case study shows the lack of traceability techniques in the existing Agile process model (SFDD- Secured Feature Driven Development) that result to non-awareness of NFR change impact during development. Based on the case study mentioned the main objective of the case study conducted in survey is to empirically test the theoretical constructs and the hypothesized relationships of the research issues that concern on the lack of change impact management towards NFR in Agile Software Methodology.  TANC (Traceability for Agile Non-Functional Requirement Change Impact) model offered techniques in tracing change impact during the agile development process. Therefore, the result of the case study, a traceability process model needs to design in order to tackle the NFR change impact issues in Agile software development

Examining perceptions of agility in software development practice

This is the post-print version of the final published article that is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 ACM.Organizations undertaking software development are often reminded that successful practice depends on a number of non-technical issues that are managerial, cultural and organizational in nature. These issues cover aspects from appropriate corporate structure, through software process development and standardization to effective collaborative practice. Since the articulation of the 'software crisis' in the late-1960s, significant effort has been put into addressing problems related to the cost, time and quality of software development via the application of systematic processes and management practices for software engineering. Early efforts resulted in prescriptive structured methods, which have evolved and expanded over time to embrace consortia/ company-led initiatives such as the Unified Modeling Language and the Unified Process alongside formal process improvement frameworks such as the International Standards Organization's 9000 series, the Capability Maturity Model and SPICE. More recently, the philosophy behind traditional plan-based initiatives has been questioned by the agile movement, which seeks to emphasize the human and craft aspects of software development over and above the engineering aspects. Agile practice is strongly collaborative in its outlook, favoring individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan (see Sidebar 1). Early experience reports on the use of agile practice suggest some success in dealing with the problems of the software crisis, and suggest that plan-based and agile practice are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, flexibility may arise from this unlikely marriage in an aim to strike a balance between the rigor of traditional plan-based approaches and the need for adaptation of those to suit particular development situations. With this in mind, this article surveys the current practice in software engineering alongside perceptions of senior development managers in relation to agile practice in order to understand the principles of agility that may be practiced implicitly and their effects on plan-based approach

Compulsory Liability Insurance for Commercial Motor Vehicles

With its core in adaptability and change responsiveness, the Agile methodology has become a popular application of the project process within the often volatile environment of today’s software development projects. The Agile methodology emphasizes interaction between project roles over documentation and formal processes. This higher interaction increases the need for functioning information dissemination throughout the entire project process. The study was carried out at a small sized Swedish IT consultancy firm. The company wished to acquire a project management and planning software tool to support the entire project process and all involved project roles. However, awareness of areas in the project process in need of support was not entirely clear. Therefore, the objective of the study was to investigate the company’s application of the Agile project process and identify potential challenges. Furthermore, the objective was to investigate how a project management and planning software tool can support the Agile project process within software development. The thesis was carried out as an abductive case study, where qualitative data collection methods and literature studies were combined. As a result from the study, two main conclusions have been drawn. Firstly: requirements engineering, the customer role, communication, and knowledge transfer were concluded as prominent challenges in the project process in need of increased support. Secondly, a project management and planning software tool can support the project process by: increasing the communication and collaboration abilities, providing holistic and historical project overview, providing a single storage location, and providing structure. Furthermore, the study has also shown that the project management and planning software tool needs to interact with the Agile project process in order to provide successful support. As final contribution, the Interaction model was created. The model visualizes the main areas in which a project management and planning software tool must interact with the Agile process, in order to support the entire project process successfully.Genom dess anpassningsförmåga och förändringsmottaglighet har den Agila metodiken blivit en populär tillämpning för projektprocessen inom mjukvaruutveckling, en miljö där snabba förändringar tillhör vardagen. Den Agila metodiken framhäver interaktion mellan projektroller  framför  dokumentation  och  formella  processer,  vilket  ökar  behovet  av fungerande informationsspridning genom hela projektprocessen. Studien  har  utförts  hos  ett  mindre  svenskt  IT-konsultföretag,  vilket  önskade  att införskaffa en programvara för ett projektlednings- och planeringsverktyg som kan stötta hela  projektprocessen  och  alla  involverade  projektroller.  Medvetenheten  kring  de områden i projektprocessen som är i behov av stöd var däremot inte helt tydlig. Målet med   studien   var   därför   att   undersöka   företagets   tillämpning   av   den   Agila projektprocessen  och  identifiera  eventuella  utmaningar.  Vidare  var  målet  också  att undersöka hur en programvara för ett projektlednings- och planeringsverktyg kan stödja den Agila projektprocessen inom mjukvaruutveckling. Examensarbetet utfördes som en abduktiv fallstudie där flera kvalitativa datainsamlingsmetoder användes tillsammans med litteraturstudier. Som resultat av studien har två huvudslutsatser dragits. För det första; kravhantering, kundrollen, kommunikation  och  kunskapsöverföring  identifierades som framträdande utmaningar i projektprocessen i behov av ökat stöd. För det andra, att en programvara för ett projektlednings- och planeringsverktyg kan stödja projektprocessen genom att; förbättra  kommunikations-  och  samarbetsmöjligheterna,  ge  en  övergripande  och historisk projektöverblick, fungera som en gemensam lagringsplats och tillhandahålla struktur.  Vidare  har  studien  visat  att  en  programvara  för  ett  projektlednings-  och planeringsverktyg  måste  interagera  med  den  Agila  projektprocessen  för  att  ge  ett effektivt  stöd.  Som  ett  slutligt  bidrag  skapades  "the  Interaction  model",  vilken visualiserar huvudområdena inom vilka en programvara för ett  projektlednings- och planeringsverktyg måste interagera med projektprocessen för att ge ett fullt stöd till processen

Proposed Methodology for Crowdsourcing and Agile Development

In this research work, devised a methodology for ‘crowdsourcing’ focused on incorporating these methods to Agile Development in software engineering. The whole SDLC model for crowdsourcing is developed and tried to be integrated with Agile. This is done in order to speed up the process of Agile Development as Agile is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) based software engineering methodology. The ‘workers’ of the crowdsourcing process are individually assigned the Roles of the Agile methods that function upon the Agile tasks and produce the deliverables. Keywords: Crowdsourcing, Requirement Elicitation, Tasks Hierarchy Diagram, Concurrent Task Mode

A process based approach software certification model for agile and secure environment

In today’s business environment, Agile and secure software processes are essential since they bring high quality and secured software to market faster and more cost effectively. Unfortunately, some software practitioners are not following the proper practices of both processes when developing software. There exist various studies which assess the quality of software process; nevertheless, their focus is on the conventional software process. Furthermore, they do not consider weight values in the assessment although each evaluation criterion might have different importance. Consequently, software certification is needed to give conformance on the quality of Agile and secure software processes. Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to propose Extended Software Process Assessment and Certification Model (ESPAC) which addresses both software processes and considers the weight values during the assessment. The study is conducted in four phases: 1) theoretical study to examine the factors and practices that influence the quality of Agile and secure software processes and weight value allocation techniques, 2) an exploratory study which was participated by 114 software practitioners to investigate their current practices, 3) development of an enhanced software process certification model which considers process, people, technology, project constraint and environment, provides certification guideline and utilizes the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for weight values allocation and 4) verification of Agile and secure software processes and AHP through expert reviews followed by validation on satisfaction and practicality of the proposed model through focus group discussion. The validation result shows that ESPAC Model gained software practitioners’ satisfaction and practical to be executed in the real environment. The contributions of this study straddle research perspectives of Software Process Assessment and Certification and Multiple Criteria Decision Making, and practical perspectives by providing software practitioners and assessors a mechanism to reveal the quality of software process and helps investors and customers in making investment decisions