Adams, Paul

Boldyreff, Cornelia

English

University of Lincoln Institutional Repository

321Tool Support for the Eﬀective Distributionof Agile Practice(Extended Abstract)Paul Adams and Cornelia BoldyreﬀDepartment of Computing and Informatics, University of Lincoln1 IntroductionAgile methods are quickly gaining notoriety amongst software engineers. Havingbeen developed over the past decade, they now present a mature, lightweightalternative to the “classic” approaches to software engineering. Although agilemethods have solved some of the problems of established software engineeringpractice, they have created some problems of their own. Most importantly, wecan infer a, potentially problematic, requirement of collocation.The usefulness of the agile methods is restricted by this requirement of collo-cation and by the requirement of small development teams. If these requirementscan be loosened then it would be possible to apply agile methods to a larger arenaof software development. This research intends to extend the usefulness of agilemethods by deﬁning a new paradigm for software engineering practice, the “Lib-eral” paradigm and providing tool support for processes within this paradigm.2 Tool Support for the “Liberal” ParadigmThis new paradigm is based on the principles of agility combined with the ex-perience of libre software process distribution. This paradigm oﬀers importantadvantages as it will encompass all important features of both agile and libresoftware engineering practice in order to facilitate the distribution of eﬀectiveagile practice. This paradigm will provide a new set of processes that allow thedistribution of agile practice within the libre software paradigm, but also poten-tially improve the performance of collocated agile teams.In this research the intention is to develop a distributed software engineeringsupport system that will allow the eﬀective distribution of agile practice withinthe “Liberal” paradigm.Tool support for the “Liberal” environment will be provided in the form ofa plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. Existing support for distributed agile practiceis often formed as a na¨ıve, ad hoc composition of existing tools. Environmentssuch as this can oﬀer eﬀective solutions to this problem but are restricted in thatthey have not been speciﬁcally developed for this purpose. Unlike other research A complete edition of this paper can be found at http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/48/ Project SupervisorH. Baumeister et al. (Eds.): XP 2005, LNCS 3556, pp. 321–322, 2005.c© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005322 Paul Adams and Cornelia Boldyreﬀwhere process has been the focus, the principle contribution of this research shallbe a tool set for supporting processes within the “Liberal” paradigm. This toolset must be rich enough to support distributed agile practice, but ﬂexible enoughto allow libre software practitioners the low-level freedoms they are familiar.There are three types of tool that will be developed within this project:awareness tools, communication tools and task support tools. All of these shall beencapsulated within an Eclipse plug-in environment. The tasks initially identiﬁedfor support include distributed story cards, virtual daily meetings, componentintegration and most importantly, pair programming.3 Research MethodThis research is largely based on empirical process. After thoroughly researchingthe requirements of agile programmers and distributed software engineering, Iintend to iteratively implement and evaluate features for the distributed agileenvironment. Once the entire system is complete a thorough evaluation of thesystem through experimentation is planned followed by improvement (whererequired) and then further experimentation etc.This research is focused on a bottom-up approach, that is, the developmentof a tool for supporting distributed agile practice; the development of a processfor this tool and ensuring this process ﬁts within the “Liberal” paradigm aresecondary. However, there is an element of top-down approach, in that it hasbeen possible to form some high-level descriptions of the “Liberal” paradigmand processes within it.From the agile paradigm the “Liberal” paradigm inherits some of the high-level principles of the Agile Manifesto. However, these processes need to be moreadaptable than the current agile processes to ensure that the principles do notconﬂict. For example, it may not be desirable to allow customer collaborationto restrict code production. From the libre paradigm the “Liberal” paradigminherits the low-level freedoms that libre practitioners are aﬀorded. It is also im-portant for the “Liberal” paradigm to inherit scalability from the libre softwareparadigm.4 ConclusionsWe can infer from many agile methods that communication must take placein a collocated manner. This project aims to allow the distribution of eﬀectiveagile practice by providing tool support that ﬁts the “Liberal” paradigm withoutconstraining its usage within speciﬁc software processes.The main focus of this research is the creation of a tool that aids the distri-bution of eﬀective agile practice. This tool must not only support agile practicebut also oﬀer support for the communication and awareness overheads that dis-tribution causes. It is intended that the tool developed within this research willaid the distribution of eﬀective agile practice in a manner that is relevant toboth industrial practitioners and libre software practitioners and thus broadenthe usefulness of the agile methods.

Tool support for the effective distribution of agile practice (extended abstract)

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