Agile Web Engineering (AWE) Process: Perceptions within a Fortune 500 Financial Services Company

The Agile Web Engineering (AWE) Process was developed during 2001 to address the challenges that we believe new effective Web development processes will have to tackle. In October 2001, Andrew McDonald started a one year Ph.D. Internship with a Fortune 500 Global Financial Services Company with the goal of exploring the use of AWE in a commercial environment. In this paper we discuss the results of two surveys within the company. First, a company sponsored review of the current in-house software development process, before AWE's first commercial pilot. Second, a survey of development and line management staff in both the business and the technology sectors, after AWE's first commercial pilot. The initial survey established how a large company, with extensive experience of software development, was coping with the changing demands of developing Web-based applications and other software projects where time-to-market pressures are a major driver. After introducing the principles of an agile approach to software development we carried out a successful pilot using AWE on a retail Internet banking application, significantly increasing end-user task completion rates. We then carried out a further survey to assess company stakeholders' impressions of AWE. Both the pre- and post-AWE Pilot surveys strongly suggest that the company is trying to cope with Web Engineering process challenges similar to those facing other organisations. The post-AWE pilot survey indicates that the AWE process is better suited and more capable as a Web Engineering process than the current in-house company process. The post-AWE Pilot also describes the primary hurdles encountered to getting AWE officially adopted within the company, these include: need for a cultural change before agile processes, including AWE, could be successfully adopted; inertia and the company's desire to have a one-size fits all process approach as opposed to processes specific to different categories of software development. We validated our findings using Boehm and Turner's 'home grounds' analysis to identify the company's sweet-spot in the process spectrum. Using home grounds analysis we identify that plan-driven processes rather than agile processes are better suited to typical projects within the company. However, home grounds analysis and both our surveys strongly indicate that better results can be achieved in Web Engineering projects within the company, by using an agile process approach, such as AWE, specifically focused on Web-based application development.

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