Characteristics of Agile Teams– A Discussion on Technology and Culture

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Badri N Srinivasan ◽  
Debarshi Mukherjee

Agile methodologies offer an alternative to traditional software engineering processes for developing software products and systems. They focus on integrating behavioral and social factors into software development. The focus on people is a very important factor in the implementation of agile methodologies in the workplace. The focus on agile teams for developing software systems and products using agile software development methodologies predisposes the emphasis on the analysis of the key components of agile teams which are important to ensure that the characteristics of agile teams are factored appropriately in the organization so that the teams are having the pre-requisite environment setup for successfully developing software systems.This paper investigates the various components and social processes that contribute to the characteristics of agile. The paper aims at highlighting a framework made up of various components that focus on the critical attributes of an agile team and if these attributes are present in an agile team, then the probability for the team to work as a high performance agile team and deliver successful software products in the market place is increased considerably.

Author(s):  
Vinay Kukreja ◽  
Amitoj Singh

In the globalization of fast changing business and technology environment, it becomes very important to respond quickly to changing user requirements. Traditional methodologies are not appropriate for the projects where user requirements are not fixed. Agile methodologies have been developed to cope up with user changing requirements and emphasize more on working software and customer collaboration. Agile is an umbrella term and it is used for many software development methodologies which shares common characteristics. This chapter mainly focuses on the working methodology of agile development and the usage areas of industry where agile development is implemented. Agile software development is difficult in distributed environment as the team members are at distributed locations. This chapter discusses agile industry applicability enablers which are useful for agile software development in distributed environment.


Author(s):  
Ernest Mnkandla

This chapter aims to reveal agile techniques that have been applied to software development and have resulted in meaningful improvements in software productivity. Available literature generally state some claims on the gains associated with the use of particular agile methodologies in software development. What lacks however, is a comprehensive analysis of how the application of agile techniques as a family will lead to improvement in software productivity. This chapter therefore provides such details. Software productivity techniques provide ways of measuring three things in order to determine the productivity of software; software products, software production processes and structures, and software production setting. Agile methodologies improve software productivity by focusing on the software production process and structures. The fundamental concern of this chapter is to show that agile methodologies measure the production process activities in a different but effective way from the more traditional approaches. For example, time-to-market is reduced by use of an iterative incremental development approach.


2009 ◽  
pp. 2680-2699
Author(s):  
James F. Kile ◽  
Maheshwar R. Inampudi

Of great interest to software development professionals is whether the adaptive methods found in agile methodologies can be successfully implemented in a highly disciplined environment and still provide the benefits accorded to fully agile projects. As a general rule, agile software development methodologies have typically been applied to non-critical projects using relatively small project teams where there are vague requirements, a high degree of anticipated change, and no significant availability or performance requirements (Boehm & Turner, 2004). Using agile methods in their pure form for projects requiring either high availability, high performance, or both is considered too risky by many practitioners (Boehm et al., 2004; Paulk, 2001). When one investigates the various agile practices, however, one gets the impression that each may still have value when separated from the whole. This chapter discusses how one team was able to successfully drive software development quality improvements and reduce overall cycle time through the introduction of several individual agile development techniques. Through the use of a common-sense approach to software development, it is shown that the incorporation of individual agile techniques does not have to entail additional risk for projects having higher availability, performance, and quality requirements.


Author(s):  
J. Kile

Of great interest to software development professionals is whether the adaptive methods found in agile methodologies can be successfully implemented in a highly disciplined environment and still provide the benefits accorded to fully agile projects. As a general rule, agile software development methodologies have typically been applied to non-critical projects using relatively small project teams where there are vague requirements, a high degree of anticipated change, and no significant availability or performance requirements (Boehm & Turner, 2004). Using agile methods in their pure form for projects requiring either high availability, high performance, or both is considered too risky by many practitioners (Boehm et al., 2004; Paulk, 2001). When one investigates the various agile practices, however, one gets the impression that each may still have value when separated from the whole. This chapter discusses how one team was able to successfully drive software development quality improvements and reduce overall cycle time through the introduction of several individual agile development techniques. Through the use of a common-sense approach to software development, it is shown that the incorporation of individual agile techniques does not have to entail additional risk for projects having higher availability, performance, and quality requirements.


Author(s):  
Sergio Galvan-Cruz ◽  
Manuel Mora ◽  
Rory V. O'Connor ◽  
Francisco Acosta ◽  
Francisco Álvarez

Software Process Improvement efforts (SPI) are pursued by organizations for improving the overall quality of their software development processes. However, very small entities (VSEs) avoid them by the lack of required financial and other organizational resources. In contrast, VSEs use agile software development methodologies (ASDMs), but these ASDMs do not foster adherence to best scholastic practices promoted by SPI. Furthermore, while a new ISO/IEC standard (29110) has been recently released for VSEs, it was not designed taking account the ASDM approaches. Thus, we investigate the extent of adherence of main ASDMs (two industrial and one academic type) with this new standard. Initial results provide evidence on the strong need to enhance the two industrial ASDMs (XP and SCRUM). In contrast, the academic ASDM (UPEDU) fits the standard very well but it is scarcely used by VSEs. Hence, it is concluded that there is a knowledge gap between the praxis with ASDMs and the recommended scholastic software processes like the ISO/IEC 29110 standard for VSEs.


In this work explored evolution of software lifecycle models firstly to lightweight and then to agile software development methodologies, and factors that have led to a search for ways to improve approaches to software development. Also compared "outdated" development designing approaches with modern flexible and made conclusions whether the advantage of the latter over the firsts is absolute and whether or not they and only they should be used in practice or maybe older approaches still have their advantages and it is too early to exclude them.


Author(s):  
Sergio Galvan-Cruz ◽  
Manuel Mora ◽  
Rory V. O'Connor ◽  
Francisco Acosta ◽  
Francisco Álvarez

Software Process Improvement efforts (SPI) are pursued by organizations for improving the overall quality of their software development processes. However, very small entities (VSEs) avoid them by the lack of required financial and other organizational resources. In contrast, VSEs use agile software development methodologies (ASDMs), but these ASDMs do not foster adherence to best scholastic practices promoted by SPI. Furthermore, while a new ISO/IEC standard (29110) has been recently released for VSEs, it was not designed taking account the ASDM approaches. Thus, we investigate the extent of adherence of main ASDMs (two industrial and one academic type) with this new standard. Initial results provide evidence on the strong need to enhance the two industrial ASDMs (XP and SCRUM). In contrast, the academic ASDM (UPEDU) fits the standard very well but it is scarcely used by VSEs. Hence, it is concluded that there is a knowledge gap between the praxis with ASDMs and the recommended scholastic software processes like the ISO/IEC 29110 standard for VSEs.


Author(s):  
John McAvoy ◽  
David Sammon

Discussions on agile software development methodologies have a tendency to develop into an argument between proponents of agile methods and proponents of more traditional process-oriented methodologies. The terminology used in these debates is often unhelpful, and in many cases are inaccurate and biased representations. It needs to be accepted that there are no “silver bullets” providing universal solutions (Jeffries, 2001). Bearing this in mind, the decision to adopt a particular software development methodology is a difficult one, and the decision to choose an agile method is no exception. In theory, as in practice, definitions and descriptions of the various agile methods are presented, yet the factors considered in the decision to adopt, or not adopt, an agile method are not addressed. While agile methodologies try to avoid the excessive use of procedures or tools (Beck & Fowler, 2001), one agile methodology, dynamic systems development method (DSDM), does recommend the use of appropriate tools during the development process (Coesmans, 2003). However, it appears that none of the available agile methodologies suggest a tool to assist decision makers at the project initiation phase, therefore, the debate on agile suitability is usually a debate on agile versus traditional methods (DeMarco & Boehm, 2002), rather than an examination of the suitability of agile methods for a particular project. While the “agile debate” rages, individual projects are not adequately assessed prior to the adoption of a method.


Author(s):  
Marriam Nawaz ◽  
Tahira Nazir ◽  
Seema Islam ◽  
Momina Masood ◽  
Awais Mehmood ◽  
...  

In this IT era, where there is a race of software development, it is necessary to introduce such types of software development techniques which will help the practitioners to deliver fast solutions. In the past, various traditional approaches were used for this purpose, but now agile techniques are getting more popular because conventional software development approaches are not efficient in managing the changing requirements. The agile software development process is one of the most emerging lightweight software development methodologies, which uses iterative and prototype development approaches to accommodate changes in software requirements. Final software products are delivered to the end-users in short iterations. One of the most noticeable drawbacks of agile methods is their limited courtesy to the structured and architectural design of the system. Hence this development approach will restrict small to medium design decisions only. In this paper, we have performed the analysis of different agile techniques, which will help the readers to understand their positive and negative points and select the most appropriate technique suited to their projects.


Author(s):  
Kiran Saeed ◽  
Yaser Hafeez ◽  
Sadia Ali ◽  
Muhammad Usman Shahid ◽  
Naila Iqbal

Many agile software development practices are promoted to improve the quality of software products. In recent years agile software development overlooked the usability features that effected system productivity.Usability is a main feature of interaction. Interaction is a way of a farming relationship between people and designed objects. An interactive model provides the way to band application together to achieve target user’s need. Usability gained attention of researchers and engineers because of its own importance. Agile software methods and usability engineering played a major role for producing better and reliable products, because both of them are concepts of methods as well as practices. The purpose of this research was to highlight the need of usability practices. The proposed model demonstrates that usability heuristics were much compatible with agile methodologies and would help to improve its productivity by reducing time and cost. Action research was applied for the development of framework proposed. The framework was evaluated using case study and further results were compared with existing related work.


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