Tailoring Software Development Methodologies in Practice: A Case Study

Software development methodologies (SDM) have been traditionally defined in a prescriptive manner with an underlying assumption of universal applicability. However, as industrial practice suggests, this assumption is fundamentally flawed. Software development projects very rarely adopt a methodology in such a rigid fashion. Conversely methodologies are normally adapted to meet specific contextual characteristics. This adaptation, known as Method Tailoring (MT), generally occurs implicitly. Implicit adaptation has several drawbacks. Firstly, responsibility and consequences are not attributable to the decisions made during MT. Secondly, MT experience is not captured, thus not being shared and reused within the organization. As a consequence, implicit MT leads to reactive rather than proactive adaptation with negative effects on both productivity and efficient use of resources. In order to alleviate the problems described above, this paper proposes a framework aimed at assisting software development teams and organizations in the elicitation of their Method Tailoring processes. As a result the know-how and experience accumulated during the practice of Method Tailoring is made explicit and organized for the benefit of future projects. The framework has been applied a posteriori to a project carried out by a medium-sized software development company for the Italian national public health service

PROPOSED FRAMEWORK FOR TAILORING AGILE-BASED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM SIZED COMPANIES

High risks are involved as well as a large number of resources are required to construct the software development processes from scratch. Most of the software development companies follow ad-hoc approaches in informal ways to tailor an existing software development process according to their requirements. Instead of devising new tailoring strategies, these approaches describe and compare the similar tailoring operations at very superficial level and mainly focus on the large sized software development companies

PROPOSED FRAMEWORK FOR TAILORING AGILE-BASED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM SIZED COMPANIES

High risks are involved as well as a large number of resources are required to construct the software development processes from scratch. Most of the software development companies follow ad-hoc approaches in informal ways to tailor an existing software development process according to their requirements. Instead of devising new tailoring strategies, these approaches describe and compare the similar tailoring operations at very superficial level and mainly focus on the large sized software development companies

Turning Development Standards Into Repositories of Experiences

There has been a resurgence of interest in developing organization-wide Standard Development Methodologies (SDMs) for software development. It is well-known that creating an SDM is only the first step in the process of improving software engineering practices in an organization. SDMs must become living documents that evolve with changing software development needs. The research presented in this paper presents a tool and associated methodology that helps organizations tailor SDMs to the individual needs of projects and capture project experiences that are used to refine and modify the standard. In addition to creating a flexible software process with necessary degrees of formal procedures to ensure high-quality products, a secondary goal of this research is to turn SDMs into a resource for software managers and developers, something that truly supports the development process as it is actually practiced. This approach features a methodology based on organizational learning principles, a rule-based system to tailor the SDM to meet the characteristics of individual projects, and a case-based architecture to capture and provide relevant development knowledge throughout the development lifecycle