Comparative Study on Agile software development methodologies

Today-s business environment is very much dynamic, and organisations are constantly changing their software requirements to adjust with new environment. They also demand for fast delivery of software products as well as for accepting changing requirements. In this aspect, traditional plan-driven developments fail to meet up these requirements. Though traditional software development methodologies, such as life cycle-based structured and object oriented approaches, continue to dominate the systems development few decades and much research has done in traditional methodologies, Agile software development brings its own set of novel challenges that must be addressed to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software. It is a set of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development process, where requirements and development evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams that allows rapid delivery of high quality software to meet customer needs and also accommodate changes in the requirements. In this paper, we significantly identify and describe the major factors, that Agile development approach improves software development process to meet the rapid changing business environments. We also provide a brief comparison of agile development methodologies with traditional systems development methodologies, and discuss current state of adopting agile methodologies. We speculate that from the need to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software, Agile software development is emerged as an alternative to traditional plan-based software development methods. The purpose of this paper, is to provide an in-depth understanding, the major benefits of agile development approach to software development industry, as well as provide a comparison study report of ASDM over TSDM.Comment: 25 pages, 25 images, 86 references used, with authors biographie

Comparative Study on Agile Software Development Methodologies

Today2018;s business environment is very much dynamic, and organizations are constantly changing their software requirements to adjust with new environment. They also demand for fast delivery of software products as well as for accepting changing requirements. In this aspect, traditional plan-driven developments fail to meet up these requirements. Though traditional software development methodologies, such as life cycle-based structured and object oriented approaches, continue to dominate the systems development few decades and much research has done in traditional methodologies, Agile software development brings its own set of novel challenges that must be addressed to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software. It2018;s a set of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development process, where requirements and development evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams that allows rapid delivery of high quality software to meet customer needs and also accommodate changes in the requirements. In this paper, we significantly indentify and describe the major factors, that Agile development approach improves software development process to meet the rapid changing business environments. We also provide a brief comparison of agile development methodologies with traditional systems development methodologies, and discuss current state of adopting agile methodologies

Human factors and cultural influences in implementing agile philosophy and agility in global software development

As software becomes increasingly important to all aspects of industry, developers should be encouraged to adopt best practice and hence improve the quality of the processes used, and achieve targets relating to time, budget and quality. In the software industry, several software methodologies have been used to address software development problems; however some of these processes may be too bureaucratic. The Agile Alliance formed in 2001, sought to address this problem; accordingly, they developed a manifesto and twelve principles, to which all agile software methods adhere. The purpose of the manifesto and its principles is to uncover better ways of developing software. Agile software development methods seem to address the software development industry’s need for more agile processes that are responsive to changes during software development. Agile values and principles require a major cultural change for software managers, e.g. collective team responsibility and self-organisation, especially in large organisations with a strong culture of planning and centralised power. In large global organisations, this issue is likely to be exacerbated by cultural diversity. The objective of this thesis is to analyse the possibility, of using agile methods or practices in different cultures, and study what changes are required, to adapt agile approaches to different global application development issues. The study found that certain agile practices can be useful in different cultures and some practices required major cultural adaptation. A study of suitable practices for different cultures such as Australia, India and the United Kingdom and the associated suggested changes required are the main areas of study. Human factors have been identified by researchers and practitioners to impact on software development projects. Similarly, cultural differences may also be influential in a global market. The principles of agile software development focus on iterative adaptation and improvement of the activities of individual software development teams to increase effectiveness. This research programme focused specifically on national culture based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, Hall’s cultural dimensions and the relationships between different aspects of national culture and the implementation of agile methods. To investigate this aspect of software development, a set of cultural dimensions and consolidated cultural agile attributes were developed, that are considered necessary for implementing agile methods. Based on relevancy, cultural dimensions such as Individualism/Collectivism, Power distance index, Uncertainty avoidance index, Time and Context were selected and studied. Some of cultural agile attributes studied include Transparency, Dedicated team, Decision making, Tolerance for change, Time keeping and Authoritative. This set was identified from a literature review on culture for agile methods, a detailed analysis of relevant commonly used agile methods and from feedback from agile experts. This thesis involves qualitative interviews conducted in Australia, India, and the UK using an interpretive paradigm and aims to identify cultural dimensions to implement agile methods in the software engineering community. The results of this research programme provide an analytical comparative framework for implementing agile methods in different cultures, and insight into how cultural differences may affect a software project and how these challenges can be addressed through agile principles

An algorithmic-based software change effort prediction model using change impact analysis for software development

Software changes are inevitable due to the dynamic nature of the software development project itself. Some software development projects practice their own customised methodology but mostly adopt two kinds of methodologies; Traditional and Agile. Traditional methodology emphasizes on detailed planning, comprehensive documentation and extensive design that resulted a low rate of changes acceptance. In contrast, Agile methodology gives high priority on accepting changes at any point of time throughout the development process as compared to the Traditional methodology. Among the primary factor that has direct impact on the effectiveness of the change acceptance decision is the accuracy of the change effort prediction. There are two current models that have been widely used to estimate change effort which are algorithmic and non-algorithmic models. The algorithmic model is known for its formal and structural way of estimation and best suited for Traditional methodology. While non-algorithmic model is widely adopted for Agile methodology of software projects due to its easiness and requiring less work in term of effort predictability. The main issue is that none of the existing change effort prediction models is proven to suits for both, Traditional and Agile methodology. Additionally, there is as yet no clear evidence of the most accurate change effort prediction model for software development phase. One of the method to overcome these challenges is the inclusion of change impact analysis in the estimation process. The aim of the research is to overcome the challenges of change effort prediction for software development phase: inconsistent states of software artifacts, repeatability using algorithmic approach and applicability for both Traditional and Agile methodologies. This research proposed an algorithmic change effort prediction model that used change impact analysis method to improve the accuracy of the effort estimation. The proposed model used a current selected change impact analysis method for software development phase which is the SDP-CIAF (Software Development Phase-Change Impact Analysis Framework). A software prototype was also developed to support the implementation of the model. The proposed model was evaluated through an extensive experimental validation using case scenarios of six real Traditional and Agile methodologies software projects. A comparative study was also conducted for further validation and verification of the proposed model. The analysis result showed an accuracy improvement of 13.44% average mean difference for change effort prediction over the current selected change effort prediction model. The evaluation results also confirmed the applicability for both Traditional and Agile methodologies

An agile business process improvement methodology

Adoption of business process improvement strategies are now a concern of most organisations. Organisations are still facing challenges and finding transient solutions to immediate problems. The misalignment between IT solutions and organisational aspects evolves across space and time showing discrepancies. Unfortunately, existing business process approaches are not according with continuous business process improvement involving business stakeholders. Considering this limitation in well-known Business Process (BP) methodologies, this paper presents a comparative study of some approaches and introduces agility in the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM). Our intention is to present observed problems in existing approaches and introduce agility in our proposal to address features, like the alignment between daily work practices and business process descriptions, in a simple and agile way. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

CoFeD: A visualisation framework for comparative quality evaluation

Evaluation for the purpose of selection can be a challenging task particularly when there is a plethora of choices available. Short-listing, comparisons and eventual choice(s) can be aided by visualisation techniques. In this paper we use Feature Analysis, Tabular and Tree Representations and Composite Features Diagrams (CFDs) for profiling user requirements and for top-down profiling and evaluation of items (methods, tools, techniques, processes and so on) under evaluation. The resulting framework CoFeD enables efficient visual comparison and initial short-listing. The second phase uses bottom-up quantitative evaluation which aids the elimination of the weakest items and hence the effective selection of the most appropriate item. The versatility of the framework is illustrated by a case study comparison and evaluation of two agile methodologies. The paper concludes with limitations and indications of further work