Agile software development of embedded systems

Few years ago, who would have believed that agile software development will penetrate to all industry sectors so rapidly. It is therefore no surprise that major IT corporations including Microsoft, SAP and others have announced publicly of trialling agile methods in their development settings. AGILE project has piloted different aspects of agile practices, techniques and methods in the embedded development settings. In line with large corporate adoption of agile methods, in this newsletter, Nokia Network reports the widespread results of their agile software development. Currently, it appears that the Scrum method is gaining the most attention in the embedded software domain. Scrum provides a simple to understand management framework for managing agile development. Another clear indication of wide spread acceptance is the work undertook by IEEE working group lead by Mr. Scott Duncan. Duncan's group aims at crafting a set of recommended practices for agile supplier and software acquirer. The work is planned to be concluded by the end of 2007. AGILE consortium has also taken part to the development of these guidelines and plans to trial the document's upcoming version. This newsletters presents recent results from the AGILE project and cover interesting perspectives to agile software development of embedded systems. Two of the articles focus on testing issues and another two present novel views on business agility. F-Secure's localisation article presents an award winning solution on how to implement agile principles and development rhythm also in different organizational functions. N e w s l e t t e r #2 / 2 0 0 6 AGILE-ITEA project presents a new software development technology capable of producing a significant improvement for the competitive position of the embedded software industry in Europe. The project develops agile software development solutions for the embedded domain. The goal is to to increase the reliability, productivity and reduce the risk of embedded software development. The solutions are validated by industrial trials in many different application domains. Agile activities in Nokia Networks started about one year and a half ago. From a moderate start, the demand for agile and iteration development has expanded due to very good experiences in software development programs. Although programs are willing to apply agile methods, there are still issues that need to be understood and studied to gain even better results. In Nokia Networks we have a project called Flexible R&D project, which supports programs by adopting agile practices and disseminating …

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