An Approach for Assessing Suitability of Agile Solutions: A Case Study

Dynamic market situation and changing customer requirements generate more demands for the product development. Product releases should be developed and managed in short iterations answering to the rapid external changes and keeping up a high quality level. Agile practices (such as the best practices in Extreme Programming and Scrum) offer a great way of monitoring and controlling rapid product development cycles and release development. One problem in product development projects, however, is how to apply agile methods and principles as a part of the complex product development. The purpose of this paper is to describe, how Agile Assessment was conducted in a case company in order to support product development and customer support improvement. During the experiment it was found that Agile Assessment is an efficient method to clarify what agile practices are suitable for the organization's product development and customer co-operation. Another finding was that the use of the best suitable agile practices would improve incremental development monitoring and traceability of requirements.

[1]  K. Beck,et al.  Extreme Programming Explained , 2002 .

[2]  Christ Vriens.  Certifying for CMM Level 2 and ISO9001 with XPAtsignScrum. , 2003 .

[3]  Peter Gould.  What is agility? [agile manufacturing] , 1997 .

[4]  Pekka Abrahamsson,et al.  Mobile-D: an agile approach for mobile application development , 2004, OOPSLA '04.

[5]  Barry Boehm,et al.  Balancing Agility and Dis-cipline: A Guide for the Perplexed , 2003 .

[6]  Peter Lappo,et al.  Assessing Agility , 2004, XP.

[7]  Mark C. Paulk,et al.  Extreme Programming from a CMM Perspective , 2001, IEEE Softw..

[8]  Pekka Abrahamsson,et al.  Self-Adaptability of Agile Software Processes: A Case Study on Post-iteration Workshops , 2004, XP.

[9]  Victor R. Basili,et al.  Software Quality: An Overview from the Perspective of Total Quality Management , 1994, IBM Syst. J..

[10]  Kurt Schneider,et al.  Breaking the ice for agile development of embedded software: an industry experience report , 2004, Proceedings. 26th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[11]  Barry Boehm,et al.  Balancing agility and discipline , 2004 .

[12]  R. Kylmakoski.  Efficient authoring of software documentation using RaPiD7 , 2003, 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2003. Proceedings..

[13]  Ken Schwaber,et al.  Agile Software Development with SCRUM , 2001 .

[14]  Petri Kettunen,et al.  How to steer an embedded software project: tactics for selecting the software process model , 2005, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[15]  Bill Greene.  Agile methods applied to embedded firmware development , 2004, Agile Development Conference.

[16]  Michele Marchesi,et al.  Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering , 2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[17]  Kent L. Beck,et al.  Extreme programming explained - embrace change , 1990 .