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

Agile software development approach for \u27ad-hoc\u27 IT projects

Restrictive Scrum assumptions make the effectiveness of this approach debatable in projects deviating from typical execution conditions. This article delivers a comprehensive software development approach for both academic and commercial Information Technology (IT) projects effectuated by teams that are hampered by significantly unsystematic participation of project members and mercurial internal communication. The nature of ‘ad-hoc’ projects imposes another level of difficulty in terms of both managing the conduct of such a project and ensuring the quality of the end product. Multicyclic action research enabled a gradual adaptation of the Scrum approach to support such project conditions. This study introduces major alterations to Sprint implementation and minor enhancements within the documentation process to streamline knowledge sharing among Development Team members. Proposed key alterations include the evolution of Daily Scrum towards Weekly Scrum, the possibility of extending Sprints length, the eventuality to switch team members during Sprint due to substantial failure to meet deadlines, having at least two team members responsible for a single Product Backlog Item (PBI) at all times, as well as exclusion of Burndown Chart in favor for Development Team members updating their working time. Positive validation of enhancements in mixed settings confirms that the generic Scrum framework can be adapted to support highly volatile projects. The proposed approach is suitable not only for carrying out software development initiatives that rely heavily on the skills of external experts and/or volunteers. It also supports traditional Scrum teams that seek to reduce their exposure to risk arising from organizational changes

Enhancing Software Team Planning and Delivery Performance using Agile Driven Quality Measures: Approach, Results, and Recommendations

Implementing a performance-management program in an agile software-development organization is important to retain sight of software team performance as a whole as well as linking performance-management metrics to business value. The evaluation criteria for software engineers’ performance have been traditionally driven by metrics that don’t fit into agile-development principles. This research implements a measurement metric that aligns with agile-development core values and principles to evaluate engineers in a software engineering firm using the Scrum development method. The research focused on measuring and evaluating the productivity, development efficiency, social skills, team collaboration and breadth of knowledge. Observing the Productivity Index (PI), Actual Productivity for software Engineers (APSE), and Productivity Variance (PV) for individual software engineers and the development team at the end of each sprint helped the development team have a better understanding of its productivity levels in a matter that facilitated planning future sprints. In addition, this productivity measure helped early identification of productivity challenges encountered by several software engineers and productivity identification of productivity challenges encountered by several software engineers. Keywords: Agile development, software teams, process measurement, scrum, productivity, efficiency, software metrics, software project measuremen

Hybrid Project Management Approach for Software Modernization

Software modernization or legacy modernization, refers to the conversion, rewriting or porting of a legacy system to a modern computer programming language, software libraries, protocols, or hardware platform. Legacy transformation aims to retain and extend the value of the legacy investment through migration to new platforms [1]. Currently, I am working as a Senior Business Analyst with Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of the largest insurance provider in the United States across the health sector. I am deployed to work on their initiative towards software modernization along the healthcare industry through their software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform – “The Healthcare Online Resources (THOR)”. This service is available to numerous providers in the healthcare vertical to leverage their current operations and comprises of multiple modules including but not limited to claim adjustments, preauthorization and group coverage status. With the ongoing centralization of resources and increased competition, most of the companies are focusing on software modernization by leveraging their current technologies and hardware platforms, to remain the trendsetters and viable in the marketplace. To enhance my efficacy and understanding of the business requirements, I would like to conduct my thesis research towards the topic of “Software Modernization”. I would be able to leverage my experience as Senior Business Analyst to understand and bridge the gap between business requirements and the supporting technology backup. Being working in a multinational company, with multiple cross-functional teams, I plan to include different research results through self-surfing and interaction with these team members. Additionally, I had like to conduct surveys across these cross-functional teams mainly business and technical teams to understand and document their challenges and experience. Therefore, I strongly feel that I would be able to justify the thesis and the corresponding research

Developing Indie Games With Agile

Agile software development has ushered in major improvements to the development of software in the 21st century. Video game development is a form of development that is unique from other types of software engineering, as it can involve work from artists, musicians, voice actors, and others. This paper explores the question whether agile software development as Scrum is an effective tool for creating video games. Ultimately, it can be seen that agile is a very important asset to game developers

Enterprise Agility: Why Is Transformation so Hard?

Enterprise agility requires capabilities to transform, sense and seize new business opportunities more quickly than competitors. However, acquiring those capabilities, such as continuous delivery and scaling agility to product programmes, portfolios and business models, is challenging in many organisations. This paper introduces definitions of enterprise agility involving business management and cultural lenses for analysing large-scale agile transformation. The case organisation, in the higher education domain, leverages collaborative discovery sprints and an experimental programme to enable a bottom-up approach to transformation. Meanwhile the prevalence of bureaucracy and organisational silos are often contradictory to agile principles and values. The case study results identify transformation challenges based on observations from a five-month research period. Initial findings indicate that increased focus on organisational culture and leveraging of both bottom-up innovation and supportive top-down leadership activities, could enhance the likelihood of a successful transformation

A maturity model for DevOps

Nowadays, businesses aim to respond to customer needs at unprecedented speed. Thus, many companies are rushing to the DevOps movement. DevOps is the combination of Development and Operations and a new way of thinking in the software engineering domain. However, no common understanding of what it means has yet been achieved. Also, no adoption models or fine-grained maturity models to assist DevOps maturation and implementation were identified. Therefore, this research attempt to fill these gaps. A systematic literature review is performed to identify the determining factors contributing to the implementation of DevOps, including the main capabilities and areas with which it evolves. Then, two sets of interviews with DevOps experts were performed and their experience used to build the DevOps Maturity Model. The DevOps maturity model was then developed grounded on scientific and professional viewpoints. Once developed the Maturity Model was demonstrated in a real organisation.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Applying Normalization Process Theory to Explain Large-Scale Agile Transformation

Given the prevalence and effectiveness of agile methods at a team level, large organizations are now attempting to mimic this success at large-scale by adopting large-scale methods such as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Spotify, and Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS). However, compared to insights on traditionally small-scale methods, the extant literature provides sparse coverage on theories to examine large-scale agile transformations. In this article, we focus on the challenge of normalizing large-scale agile transformations and apply Normalization Process Theory (NPT) to support theorize about this process. We present our initial case study findings and outline future research on the application of NPT for large-scale transformations. From a research and practice perspective, we explain how NPT can be adopted to focus on the processes of embedding and sustaining practices – activities which are very often ignored, yet central to the success or failure of transformations