Evolutionary Software Development: An Experience Report on Technical and Strategic Requirements
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Abstract
Traditional software engineering approaches are no longer suitable when dealing with the development of innovative, complex software systems, such as e.g. applications of neural networks for geophysical subsurface modeling. At TNO, we succeeded to define and to establish a "hybrid" life cycle plan that integrates the developers' view of a creative, flexible and unrestricted development process on the basis of evolutionary prototyping with the management's needs for organization, controllability, and clearness of a software project. We report the experiences we made when applying the evolutionary life cycle plan to multilateral software projects, and compare them with systems developed following the traditional approach. In this paper, we focus on the most crucial technical and strategic requirements for (controlled) evolutionary software development. We discuss the issues of team structure, commitment of, and communication with users, frequent testing, integration & version control, co..