Adopting agile methodologies in distributed software development

From the second half of the '90s, some software engineering practitioners introduced a new group of software development methodologies called Agile Methodologies (Ams): they have been developed to overcome the limits of the traditional approaches in the software development. FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) has been proposed as possible different solution to the software crisis that is afflicting the ICT worldwide business. If the AMs improve the quality code and allow to respond quickly to requirement changes, FLOSS approach decreases the development costs and increases the spreading of competences about the software products. A debate is shaping about the compatibility of these two approaches. Software development teams have been spreading around the world, with users in Europe, management in the USA and programmers in the USA and India. The scattering of team members and functions around the world introduces barriers to productivity, cultural and languages differences can lead to misunderstanding of requirements, time zone differences can delay project schedules. Agile methods can provide a competitive advantage by delivering early, simplifying communication and allowing the business to respond more quickly to the market by changing the software. Trying to distribute a development project in an agile way isn't easy and will involve compromises. The goal of this thesis is to determine the application of the AMs in several contexts so to define which of these can be used effectively in non traditional software projects as the distributed development

Adopting agile methodologies in distributed software development

From the second half of the '90s, some software engineering practitioners introduced a new group of software development methodologies called Agile Methodologies (Ams): they have been developed to overcome the limits of the traditional approaches in the software development. FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) has been proposed as possible different solution to the software crisis that is afflicting the ICT worldwide business. If the AMs improve the quality code and allow to respond quickly to requirement changes, FLOSS approach decreases the development costs and increases the spreading of competences about the software products. A debate is shaping about the compatibility of these two approaches. Software development teams have been spreading around the world, with users in Europe, management in the USA and programmers in the USA and India. The scattering of team members and functions around the world introduces barriers to productivity, cultural and languages differences can lead to misunderstanding of requirements, time zone differences can delay project schedules. Agile methods can provide a competitive advantage by delivering early, simplifying communication and allowing the business to respond more quickly to the market by changing the software. Trying to distribute a development project in an agile way isn't easy and will involve compromises. The goal of this thesis is to determine the application of the AMs in several contexts so to define which of these can be used effectively in non traditional software projects as the distributed development

Hidden and surreptitious adoption of organizational information technology solutions

"Despite a broad literature on organizational adoption of technological innovations, the extant research has paid very little attention to a particular adoption scenario corresponding to user-initiated, surreptitious acceptance of information technology (IT) solutions that have been rejected at the organizational level. This lack of attention is surprising considering the strong anecdotal evidence pointing to various examples of user initiated organizational adoption of IT solutions. For example, in spite of formal organizational policies, procedures and guidelines sanctioning only a small subset of ""pre-approved"" and mostly vendor-bound organizational IT solutions, illegitimate, surreptitious, or hidden adoption of free and open source systems and applications by technical users has become increasingly prevalent in today's organizations. While we have learned a great deal about the legitimate adoption of systems by people and organizations, we know very little about this growing category of organizational systems. Indeed, the antecedents and consequences of these forms of hidden and surreptitious adoption are likely to be multifaceted and complex. The concept of hidden and surreptitious adoption marks an important organizational occurrence where organizational hierarchy fails. The departure from ""the routine, established and sanctioned"" approaches provide an opportunity to drill down into the organizational logic behind this unexplored occurrence. Drawing on concepts from institutional theory as well as on technology adoption literature this dissertation creates a careful synthesis of two previously separate streams of research and brings together two distinct sets of factors under the umbrella concept of social influence. In an empirical study the concept of hidden and surreptitious adoption was then analyzed and a causal network was proposed to help create a better understanding of hidden and surreptitious adoption of IT systems in organizations today. The findings confirmed wide-spread organizational occurrence of hidden adoption. Four complementary causal streams were found to contribute towards the materialization and magnitude of hidden and surreptitious adoption of IT solutions. Three of these streams; normative pressures, identification pressures, and performance induced awareness were confirmed to contribute positively towards hidden adoption whereas the remaining stream, compliance pressures were found to have an inverse relationship. In turn, each stream was further evaluated in detail to uncover various factors that positively or negatively contributed to that particular stream. The empirical findings were then discussed in light of theory to identify their theoretical as well as practical implications.

Web collaboration for software engineering

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Evaluation and Measurement of Software Process Improvement -- A Systematic Literature Review

BACKGROUND: Software Process Improvement (SPI) is a systematic approach to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of a software development organization and to enhance software products. OBJECTIVE: This paper aims to identify and characterize evaluation strategies and measurements used to assess the impact of different SPI initiatives. METHOD: The systematic literature review includes 148 papers published between 1991 and 2008. The selected papers were classified according to SPI initiative, applied evaluation strategies, and measurement perspectives. Potential confounding factors interfering with the evaluation of the improvement effort were assessed. RESULTS: Seven distinct evaluation strategies were identified, wherein the most common one, "Pre-Post Comparison" was applied in 49 percent of the inspected papers. Quality was the most measured attribute (62 percent), followed by Cost (41 percent), and Schedule (18 percent). Looking at measurement perspectives, "Project" represents the majority with 66 percent. CONCLUSION: The evaluation validity of SPI initiatives is challenged by the scarce consideration of potential confounding factors, particularly given that "Pre-Post Comparison" was identified as the most common evaluation strategy, and the inaccurate descriptions of the evaluation context. Measurements to assess the short and mid-term impact of SPI initiatives prevail, whereas long-term measurements in terms of customer satisfaction and return on investment tend to be less used