Independent Evaluation of Agile Methods - Literature review Example

Independent Evaluation of Agile Methods s affiliation Independent Evaluation of Agile Methods Introduction Background What is Independent Evaluation of Agile Methods? The recent past has seen agile software development rapidly gaining a lot of interest in the field of software engineering. Agile software development popularly known as agile does not only refer to a set of tools or a single methodology, but is instead a significant departure from the previously heavyweight document- driven software development methodologies like the waterfall that has been generally in use. Erickson, Lyytinen & Siau (2005) associates agility with concepts like nimbleness, suppleness, dexterity, quickness, liveliness, or alertness and postulates agility to mean to strip away as much of the heaviness as possible that had been previously associated with the traditional software development methodologies in a bid to promote quick response to changing environment as well as the changes in the user requirements, accelerated project deadlines and the like. XP 2008, & Abrahamsson, (2008) on the other hand takes a different approach in defining agile software development by postulating it is an important domain of research within software engineering discipline and goes ahead to produce anecdotal evidence supporting the application of agile methods in not only various application domains, but also industry sectors. Pelrine (2011) further terms agile software arising as a result of a software revolution in the field of software development over the course of the last decade mainly due to late delivery of projects and over budget. He further attributes the popularity of agile software development to its ability to deliver quality software to people not only on time, but also on budget and on spec. To this end, it is clear that agile software development has established to become a major force in the socio-economic arena hence the recent quantum shift in the field towards the adoption of agile. Highsmith, & Cockburn, (2001) adds to this by postulating that thriving in the current dotcom-driven internet economy requires confronting the business need for relentless innovation and forging the future workforce culture. The further argue that agile software development approaches like extreme programming, crystal methods, lean developments, Scrum, adaptive software development (ASD) and others, view change from a perspective that mirrors the turbulent business and technology environment being experienced today. The last decade has seen a lot of research done in software development with empirical studies like that of Salo & Abrahamsson (2004) focusing on a controlled case study approach mainly applied in a study of extreme programming methodology that is performed in the close-to-industry setting in a bid to generate impact on both scientific and practical software engineering community. This study will seek to conduct an intuit and independent evaluation of agile methods while mainly seeking to understand the success factors for agile systems development, the extra values that agile methods add to an existing organization and lastly how the agile methodology has changed over the past 10 years. Importance It is evidently clear that the increase in use of technology has not only enhanced internet access, but has also increase the complexity and the unpredictability of the world around us with Agile practice being touted as the solution. This could be attributed to the fair amount of anecdotal evidence published regarding agile software development methods available mainly in the form of descriptive articles, reports and lessons-learned which mostly argue for the effectiveness of agile methods but still lack systematic empirical research on agile principals and methods. The fact that agile represents a new paradigm in the truest sense implies that a complete abandonment of old methods that cannot be done in half. Additionally, the fact that Agile addresses complexity in a manageable fashion and attuned to the needs of the human psyche is a reason enough for us to conduct this literature review. Thus, the aim of this review is mainly to independently evaluate agile methods. Methodology Search and selection criteria To undertake the evaluation of agile methods, we had to not only read, but also extensively research through a variety of sources which included journal articles, dissertations, published books, articles, reports and numerous lessons learnt from the past. The study employed the use of Google Scholar and the discovery on the university’s website as the main search engines. The main keywords arising from study are Agile, Agile software development, scientific approach, waterfall methodology and project. The selection strategy was based number of citations of the articles. I tried to take into consideration many valuable articles dating to as far as 2001. Data Analysis On being able to find the suitable sources, I researched and thoroughly read through each articles and was able to analyze, filter and categorize information based on its different backgrounds and put them down in different sub-topics. I was also able to determine the important points and the less important ones hence being able to prioritize accordingly. Quality appraisal From the research questions, it is evident that our main focus was on agile methods hence the classification of the papers with descriptions of agile software development, those comparing agile software development with other software development methodologies, those articles describing their application in the different organizations, and also the articles comparing and contrasting the agile software development methodologies and other software development methodologies. Additionally, the fact that there are various sectors where software development is employed, we then subdivided the papers according to the different sectors of the economy of the United Kingdom. Synthesis Below is a summary of the results from the synthesis of our sources in a tabular form. The various aspects have been categorized accordingly and properly differentiated so as to avoid duplication. The contextual issues and dimensions of practice we derived from the papers categorized as background. Results The above figure provides us with a summary of the results from the review process. Initially we had selected 67 paper s from where we excluded 32 papers as they were not relevant to the main topic under review and most of them were not specific to agile software development. The other reason for the exclusion was that the some of the sources were outdated. Our final categorization of the literature is as outlines below; Articles describing agile software development (N=20) Comparison and contrast between agile and other methodologies (N=10) Background and changes in agile methodology (N=5) Authors Country Aspects Techniques Erickson, Lyytinen & Siau (2005) United States of America Agile software development, the background, introduction and advances Case study analysis Comparison and contrast between agile and other software development procedures XP 2008, & Abrahamsson, (2008) Germany Agile software development compared with other models In-depth review of literature Pelrine (2011) Highsmith, & Cockburn, (2001) Salo & Abrahamsson (2004) Discussion References XP 2008, & Abrahamsson, P. (2008). Agile processes in software engineering and eXtreme Programming: 9th international conference, XP 2008, Limerick, Ireland, June 10-14, 2008: proceedings. Berlin: Springer. Dybå, T., & Dingsøyr, T. (2008). Empirical Studies of Agile Software Development: A Systematic Review, Information and Software Technology (2008), doi: 10.1016/j.infsof.2008.01.006 Pelrine, J. (2011). On understanding software agility – a social complexity point of view, E.CO 13(1-2): 26-27. Highsmith, J., & Cockburn, A. (2001). Agile software development: the business of innovation, 34 (9): 120-127. Cockburn, A. (2000). The agile software development, Highsmith Series. Zhang, Y., & Shailesh, P. (2011). Agile model-driven development in practice, Journal IEEE software, 28(2): 84-91. Xiaofeng, W., Kieran, C., & Minna, P. (2012). Assimilation of practices in use, Information systems Journal, 22(6): 435-455. Deepti, M., & Alok, M. (2011). Complex software project development: agile methods adoption, Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice, 23(8), 549-564. Samireh, J., & Claes, W. (2011). Global software engineering and agile practices: a systematic review, Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 24(6): 643-659. Singh, S., & Chana, I. (2013). Introducing Agility in Cloud Based Software Development through ASD, International Journal of U- & E-Service, Science & Technology 6 (5): 191. Bose, I. (2008). Lessons Learned from Distributed Agile Software Projects: A Case-Based Analysis, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 23 (34). Retrieved from http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol23/iss1/34 Pelrine, J. (2011). On Understanding Software Agility: A Social Complexity Point Of View, Emergence: Complexity & Organization, 13 (1/2): 26. Barlow, J. B., Giboney, J., Keith, M. J., Wilson, D., Schuetzler, R., Lowry, P. B., & Vance, A. (2011). Overview and Guidance on Agile Development in Large Organizations, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 29 (2): 25-44, Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1909431 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1909431 Gwanhoo, L., & Weidong, X. (2010). Toward agile: an integrated analysis of quantitative and qualitative field data, journal MIS Quarterly, 34(1): 87-114. Salo, O., & Abrahamsson, P. (2008). Agile methods in European embedded software development organisations: a survey on the actual use and usefulness of Extreme Programming and Scrum, Software, IET 2(1). Patel, C., Lycett, M., Macredie, R., & de Cesare, S. (2006). Perceptions of Agility and Collaboration in Software Development Practice, published in System Sciences, 2006. HICSS 06. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Munish, S., & Kuljit, K. (2014). A Review of Open Source Software Development Life Cycle Models, International Journal of Software Engineering and Its Applications, 8(3): 417-434. Persson, J., Mathiassen, L., & Aaen, I. (2013). Agile Distributed Software Development: Enacting Control through Media and Context, Information Systems Journal. Rizwan, J.Q. (2012). Agile software development methodology for medium and large projects, Software, IET, 6(4): 358-363. Naftanaila, I. (2009). Agile Software Development Methodologies: An Overview of the Current State Of Research. Batra, D., Xia, W., VanderMeer, D., & Dutta, K. (2010). Balancing Agile and Structured Development Approaches to Successfully Manage Large Distributed Software Projects: A Case Study from the Cruise Line Industry," Communications of the Association for Information Systems 27 (21).  Balasubramaniam, R., Lan, C., Kannan, M., & Peng, X. (2006). Can distributed software development be agile? Communications of the ACM, 49(10): 41-46. Kruchten, P. (2013). Contextualizing agile software development, Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 25(4): 351-361 Matther, R. K., & Lt Col Dan, W. (2012). Inserting Agility in System Development, Defense ARJ, 19(3): 249-264. Eran, R., & Hillel, R. (2011). Supporting agile software development through active documentation, Requirements Engineering, 16(2): 117-132. Read More