Agile Philosophy Research Articles

ANÁLISE DA ADOÇÃO DO LEAN MANUFACTURING NA GESTÃO DE PROJETOS DE TECNOLOGIA DA INFORMAÇÃO: Estudo de Caso em uma Multinacional desse Segmento

Este artigo, parte de uma dissertação de mestrado, apresenta um estudo sobre gestão ágil de projetos por meio do modelo Lean Manufacturing da Toyota. A resistência conservadora que visa à utilização de modelos tradicionais de gestão cria uma barreira psicológica que impede a proliferação da filosofia ágil e a mudança cultural dentro da organização. Nos últimos anos, os modelos ágeis ganharam espaço e encontraram um habitat natural de crescimento no mercado de TI. Em especial, destaca-se a metodologia de gestão ágil do Lean Manufacturing que há mais de quinze anos está transformando a maneira como empresas trabalham pelo mundo, tornando-as mais competitivas, flexíveis e estruturadas.

Architectural Solution as a tool for planning and approval of changes in projects for information systems implementation and customization

Igor V. Ilyin - Professor, Director of Graduate School of Business Technologies, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic UniversityAddress: 29, Polytechnicheskaya Street, St. Petersburg, 195251, Russian FederationE-mail: ivi2475@gmail.comAnastasiia A. Grigoreva - Doctoral Student, Graduate School of Business Technologies, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic UniversityAddress: 29, Polytechnicheskaya Street, St. Petersburg, 195251, Russian FederationE-mail: grigoreva_spb@list.ruIgor M. Zapivakhin - Consultant on Integration, SOLMIKS Consulting LLC; Master Student, Graduate School of Business Technologies, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic UniversityAddress: 29, Polytechnicheskaya Street, St. Petersburg, 195251, Russian FederationE-mail: igorzapivakhin@gmail.com The agile project management approach has been considered to be one of the most popular approaches for developing IT solutions. Use of this approach allows us to change the requirements at any stage of the IT project, and one of the twelve principles of Agile Manifesto, - “Simplicity”, - promotes the use of a minimum amount of project documentation. One of the disadvantages limiting the implementation in such resource-intensive projects as Information Systems Projects (ISP) is the risk of exceeding budgets and time limits. Therefore it is highly important to develop such a tool that will contribute in discussion and approval process with the customer before changes are started so as to minimize the possibilities of changes at further stages of the project. This article investigates the possibility of applying holistic methods of the Enterprise Architecture (EA) in order to support solutions design during an Information System Project, in particular, in the form of documentation at the stage before implementation planning. The main aim of our research is to develop a tool that will help the customer to understand the planned changes and will contribute in that their influence on the already existing EA is taken into account. This article first reviews standards of IT project management in the context of recommendations for “conceptual project” outcomes. Next, the results of interviews conducted with IT consultants are presented. The proposed Architectural Solution (AS) is a document that completes the stage of design and coordinating IT changes. It is based on the application of methods and models from the field of EA. We believe this solution may be a sufficient document for coordinating projects that are conducted under agile philosophy.

Standard Bank: The Agile Transformation

Josef Langerman, Head of IT Transformation for Standard Bank, reflected on the extraordinary transformation that his organization’s IT group had recently experienced. Over the past three years, Standard Bank’s IT group had changed from the relatively well accepted systems development lifecycle/waterfall model to a revolutionary large scale agile approach. The results had been gratifying. But it left a question unanswered. Now that things were starting to stabilize, what should be the next steps? The 154-year-old Standard Bank was the largest banking group in Africa, and the 5th largest company headquartered in South Africa. The bank offered a range of corporate, business and personal banking as well as financial services. Its 49,000 employees served over 15 million customers, in 20 countries across the continent of Africa, as well as other countries scattered around the globe. Standard Bank’s IT group, located within the company’s Johannesburg headquarters, had over 6000 employees. The group managed the bank’s technology infrastructure–including a network of nearly 10,000 ATMs, its applications development, testing, deployment, maintenance and operations. By 2014, the bank recognized that its IT performance was lagging industry benchmarks in productivity, turnaround time and employee satisfaction. Employing a “do it in-house” philosophy, it embarked on a major transformation. Abandoning traditional highly structured approaches to project management and development, it had adopted an agile philosophy that was most commonly seen in much smaller organizations and technology startups. The results had been impressive–productivity, cycle time and organizational health indicators had all risen dramatically. The group had also achieved substantial reductions in its budget. Even skeptics within the organization could not fail to be impressed. Now, however, Langerman wondered about the future. He had been cautioned by his group’s HR Culture Transformation Guide that rapid improvement could easily be followed by disillusionment. What could be done to keep the momentum going forward? Should the bank double down on the types of changes to culture, practice and training that had led to its success, or was it time to let things settle? And who should be guiding the change? Should the implementation continue entirely in-house, or should outside consultants–that were working in other areas of the bank–play a significant role? In the near future, he would need to present his recommendations to the group’s CIO.

Standard Bank: The Agile Transformation

South Africa’s largest bank has recently completed a transformation from traditional systems development to the scaled agile framework. The individual leading the transformation is now considering how to keep the momentum going and possible new directions. Josef Langerman, Head of IT Transformation for Standard Bank, reflected on the extraordinary transformation that his organization’s IT group had recently experienced. Over the past three years, Standard Bank’s IT group had changed from the relatively well accepted systems development lifecycle/waterfall model to a revolutionary large scale agile approach. The results had been gratifying. But it left a question unanswered. Now that things were starting to stabilize, what should be the next steps? The 154-year-old Standard Bank was the largest banking group in Africa, and the 5th largest company headquartered in South Africa. The bank offered a range of corporate, business and personal banking as well as financial services. Its 49,000 employees served over 15 million customers, in 20 countries across the continent of Africa, as well as other countries scattered around the globe. Standard Bank’s IT group, located within the company’s Johannesburg headquarters, had over 6000 employees. The group managed the bank’s technology infrastructure–including a network of nearly 10,000 ATMs, its applications development, testing, deployment, maintenance and operations. By 2014, the bank recognized that its IT performance was lagging industry benchmarks in productivity, turnaround time and employee satisfaction. Employing a “do it in-house” philosophy, it embarked on a major transformation. Abandoning traditional highly structured approaches to project management and development, it had adopted an agile philosophy that was most commonly seen in much smaller organizations and technology startups. The results had been impressive–productivity, cycle time and organizational health indicators had all risen dramatically. The group had also achieved substantial reductions in its budget. Even skeptics within the organization could not fail to be impressed. Now, however, Langerman wondered about the future. He had been cautioned by his group’s HR Culture Transformation Guide that rapid improvement could easily be followed by disillusionment. What could be done to keep the momentum going forward? Should the bank double down on the types of changes to culture, practice and training that had led to its success, or was it time to let things settle? And who should be guiding the change? Should the implementation continue entirely in-house, or should outside consultants–that were working in other areas of the bank–play a significant role? In the near future, he would need to present his recommendations to the group’s CIO.

Analyzing Agile Development – from Waterfall Style to Scrumban

1 IntroductionEver since 1970, when Winston W. Royce created the first forma description of the waterfall model, software development has known a multitude of various approaches. Most of them were built upon the model presented by Royce, bringing new specific characteristics. Significant development for the proposed model are described in [1] from the perspective of main characteristics, software development stages, advantages, drawbacks and utilization recommendations. Beside this description, which may be considered a guide by project managers, another important element is the incremental model for software development, the foundation of the philosophy with the same name. Combining specific elements of the waterfall model with stages and attributes of the prototype model, the incremental development philosophy is the base for what is known today as agile software development (Figure 1).From a time perspective, agile development started in February 2001, when representatives of 17 software development organization met in Utah, USA, to discuss new and lightweight methods and methodologies to develop projects. The meeting yielded the famous Manifesto for Agile Software Development, which includes the 12 development principles. [2] According to the manifest, any proj ect that observes these development principles falls under the category of agile projects. In other words, the representatives of the 17 organizations have identified easier ways to develop software projects and to help others do the same, including these aspects in the 12 principles of Agile Manifesto. Analysts claim [3] that the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto constitute a dramatic contrast from the traditional guide and de facto standard of project management PMBOK - Project Manager's Body of Knowledge.In a general way, we may say that agile development is a reaction to developers' needs when faced to ever more varied requests from clients. The economic environment is growing in flexibility, providing varied business opportunities, which requires organizations to have the ability to adapt and capitalize on these opportunities. This is only possible as long as the organizations can use agile business architectures, built upon flexible solutions. The agile software development concentrates on the client (beneficiary). Additionally, contrary to traditional approach, agile approach does not focus on creating documentation for the product. In turn, this can be a major drawback of the agile paradigm.On the other hand, an organization or business agility is a key element in gaining strategic advantages. Therefore, the existence of an agile architecture on organization level may lead to decrease in development time for new processes and increase in flexibility of existing processes. Additionally, the impact of business agility may be measured by the decrease in response time to clients' requests, increase of new client numbers, reduction of costs in adaptation to new economic scenarios and, finally, increase in organization income. The increasingly visible orientation of software developers towards agile development philosophy does not mean the traditional approach will be completely abandoned. There still are software projects of high complexity, with significant usage targets (at least regional or national level), which do not fit in any way to agile approaches (for example the project regarding national health cards in Romania).Additionally, considering the latest paradigms used on the software development market, agile philosophy is frequently associated with Cloud Computing, in order to highlight once more the flexible character of this approach on economic organization level. [4] Currently, all circumstances allow us to talk about Agile Development as a phenomenon with rapid growth from the microeconomic climate that initiated it towards the macroeconomic level. This claim is supported by the precedent of project oriented development that changed the perceptions or modern organization management. …

An Empirical Investigation of the Perceived Benefits of Agile Methodologies Using an Innovation-Theoretical model

There is little doubt that agile software development (ASD) methods have gained widespread acceptance in industry. Despite the attention these methods have received, there is little empirical affirmation of the benefits that accrue to those who use agile methodologies. Grounded in the conceptual foundations of innovation diffusion and agile philosophy of development, the authors' study validates a model to assess the perceived advantage of an iterative approach to software development. Consistent with their predictions, the results suggest that evolutionary development - the cornerstone of agile development – is perceived to be less complex and more compatible with the work habits of developers. Further, the findings support the hitherto unsubstantiated claim that iterative development yields benefits to software developers. However, process flexibility, yet another important characteristic of agile development, had no significant impact on complexity, compatibility, and relative advantage. The implications of the study for academics and practitioners, and directions for future research are discussed.

Success Factors for Agile Software Development A Case Study from Sri Lanka

Agile software development methods provide great flexibility to adapt to changing requirements and rapidly market products. Sri Lankan software organizations too are embracing these methods to develop software products. Being an iterative an incremental software engineering methodology, agile philosophy promotes working software over comprehensive documentation and heavily relies on continuous customer collaboration throughout the life cycle of the product. Hence characteristics of the people involved with the project and their working environment plays an important role in the success of an agile project compared to any other software engineering methodology. This study investigated the factors that lead to the success of a project that adopts agile methodology in Sri Lanka. An online questionnaire was used to collect data to identify people and organizational factors that lead to project success. The sample consisted of Sri Lankan software professionals with several years of industry experience in developing projects using agile methods. According to the statistical data analysis, customer satisfaction, customer commitment, team size, corporate culture, technical competency, decision time, customer commitment and training and learning have a influence on the success of the project. General Terms Agile software development methods.

Knowledge4Scrum, a novel knowledge management tool for agile distributed teams

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose Knowledge4Scrum, a novel knowledge management tool for agile distributed teams. Agile software development (ASD) refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. The two most widely used methodologies based on the agile philosophy are scrum and extreme programming. Whichever methodology is considered, agile teams usually consist of few members and are collocated under the same roof. However, nowadays, agile practices for distributed development are gaining much momentum. The main reasons behind such practice are cheaper skilled labour, minimizing production cost, reducing time to market and increasing the quality and performance of projects. Along with the benefits obtained through globally distributed development, there are, however, many difficulties faced by various organisations. These problems are caused mostly due to distance, time and cultural differences. To meet up with the level of complexity of projects, ASD also has to keep up with many challenges, especially in cases of distributed teams. Four major challenges have been identified. First, the introduction of global software development entails a number of difficulties, especially related to knowledge sharing. For instance, lack of transparency is frequently observed within such teams, whereby a team member is totally unaware of the activities of his/her colleagues. Second, the unavailability of team members due to time zone differences adds up to the list of problems confronted by distributed teams. Third, there can be misunderstanding amongst the team member due to communication problems, especially in cases where the mother language of the team members is different. Fourth, a common issue faced by distributed teams is the loss of knowledge when an employee resigns from his/her post. Design/methodology/approach – Based on the main problems outlined above, what has been proposed is Knowledge4Scrum, a novel knowledge management tool for agile distributed teams. Knowledge4Scrum will act as a global repository for knowledge sharing in Scrum distributed teams with the possibility of creating new knowledge through data mining techniques. Valid past projects data have been collected to train and test the data mining models. The research also investigates the suitability of knowledge management in Scrum distributed teams to address the various challenges addressed above. Findings – Knowledge4Scrum supports the four knowledge management processes, namely, knowledge creation/acquisition, knowledge storage, knowledge dissemination and knowledge application. It has been found that the aforementioned tool satisfactorily addressed issues of distance, time and cultural differences that crop-up in distributed development teams. Data mining has been the main aspect for the knowledge creation and application processes, whereby new knowledge has been determined by examining and extracting patterns from existing data found in the repository. Originality/value – A major feature of the Knowledge4Scrum tool lies in the knowledge creation and application section, where a number of data mining techniques have been utilised to identify trends and patterns in past data collected. When compared to the COnstructive COst MOdel to estimate project duration, Knowledge4Scrum gives more than satisfactory results. Such functionalities will actually help managers for future project planning and in decision-making.

Effective Performance of an User Friendly Dynamic Tool Design in Small and Medium Scale Enterprises

This research addresses the implementations of agile philosophy in SME’s to increase the production flow rate. Every Small manufacturing industry has put in continuous efforts for its survival in the current volatile economy. In order to face the situation, industries are trying to implement new and efficient techniques in their manufacturing operations. In this research, a systematic approach of developing a user friendly dynamic tool for cycle time reduction and to improve the production flow rate. These effective tools mainly focus on reducing the non-value adding activities, queue time and delays. Here, we selected a medium scale pump industry for our research work and the various process times for manufacturing a mono block pump were obtained from a pump manufacturing industry. The result shows that the implementations of agile manufacturing concepts to the small scale pump manufacturing industry for increasing the production time and profit level.

Where is My Pay? Critical Success Factors of a Payroll System – A System Life Cycle Approach

Majority of firms deploy technologies in HR administrative applications. While payroll processing is a routine transactional activity, poor design and implementation of payroll system can cause immense harm to employee and organizational well-being. Based on the case study of a flawed payroll system in a large and complex public sector organization in Australia, we highlight the key success factors using the system life cycle approach underpinned by the agile philosophy. It highlights the critical importance of strategic organizational review, user involvement and ongoing communication with diverse stakeholders during the planning, analysis, design, implementation and review stages of a payroll project. It reinforces the need for the adoption of and adherence to sound project and change management methodologies. We also explore the limitations of shared service center approach.

Human-centered software development methodology in mobile computing environment: agent-supported agile approach

Due to the large demand of the services from the wireless networked computing environment, the capacity and performance of wireless devices, platforms, and applications are improved. Especially, in recent years, the use of mobile applications has increased dramatically along with the concept of ‘smart’ phone. As a result, the center of human e-life has been transferred from a conventional desktop space to a mobile wireless computing environment. These rapid changes also generate additional requirements for more sophisticated and complex functionalities in wireless computing environment such as personalization or adaptation which result in the requirements of ‘human’-centered software development methodology in wireless computing environment. Although there are well-known classical software development methodologies such as waterfall, they do not fit to the characteristics of wireless computing environment. Instead, the agile software development methodology is generally used to deal with dynamically changing requirements in wireless computing environment. However, agile software development methodology is knowledge- and labor-intensive and does not fully cover the requirements that are essential to the wireless computing environment. In this paper, we analyze the requirements of mobile applications in wireless computing environment and propose a human-centered software development methodology which is to integrate agile philosophy and agent technology. Additionally, we employed the concepts of software product line engineering in order to understand and represent the variability of dynamically changing requirements. Consequently, what we propose in this paper is an agent-supported agile-based mobile software development methodology in wireless computing environment for supporting adaptive requirement changes and their automatic implementation. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, we have performed two experimental case studies by developing android mobile applications.

Validating the Applicability of Agile Requirement Generation Model

We all know that agile methodology for software development is an alternative to waterfall methodology for software development. In today’s scenario, agile methods have caught the attention of software engineers worldwide. The reasons of this popularity are its iterative nature, quick delivery of software, face to face communication, less need of lengthy documentation etc. Agile methods focus on accommodating change even late in the development lifecycle. Though agile method are successfully applied on small softwares (whose development periods are less than 1-2 years), the main issue comes when someone want to apply agile methodology on large systems (development period greater than 2 years). One of the most important issues in the development of larger scale complex systems is accommodating changes to requirements. Someone proposed a soft-structured framework which combines the principles of agile and conventional software development that solves the issue of rapidly changing requirements for larger scale systems. The framework consists of two parts. First one is a soft structured requirements gathering approach that reflects the agile philosophy i.e. the Agile Requirements Generation Model and second one is a tailored development process that can be applied to either small or larger scale systems .The main work is to validate the applicability of the Agile RGM. So this paper validates the applicability of agile requirement generation model with the help of a project.

Where to use agile methodology in Software development and its different models

Agile methods were developed to overcome shortcomings and weaknesses in conventional software engineering. It can provide important benefits, but it is not applicable to all projects. In today economy, it is always difficult and impossible to predict how a computer-based system (e.g. a web based application) will evolve as time passes. It is really difficult to define or fix requirements fully before the project begins. So our main aim is to explore all the ways by which we can use agile method in software development to execute the project successfully within time. An agile philosophy for software engineering stresses four key issues: the importance of self- organizing teams that have control over the work they perform; communication and collaboration between team members and between practitioners and their customers; a recognition that change represents an opportunity; and an emphasis on rapid delivery of software that satisfies the customer. Agile process models have been designed to address each of these issues. We will find out which method is best suited for software projects using agile methodology. We will discuss all the methods which agile supports. At the end we will be able to conclude that where agile fits best and which type of project can be done using this method.

Enhancing Agile Methods for Multi-cultural Software Project Teams

It is well documented that software projects are typically over schedule, over budget and often do not meet user requirements. The main problems are all associated with people related issues. In order to address this problem the Agile philosophy was introduced with an associated portfolio of Agile methods. These methods are specifically designed to improve software project team management. However it is now increasingly common for software projects to have multicultural team members. It is well documented that people from different cultures have considerably different expectations and methods of interacting in a team environment. In order to address this problem cultural specific Agile attributes were defined based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. The result of this study gives an insight to how cultural differences may affect a software methodology implementation, specifically Agile and how these problems can be addressed. Hence it is possible to select appropriate ‘culture and Agile specific attributes’ when working with multicultural software project team to help software development projects with agile methods.

The Impact of Agile Methodologies on the Quality of Information Systems

Systems developers and IT project managers who apply agile methods for developing information systems (IS) subscribe to a set of values and principles. This adherence to a set of values and principles, along with a passion or fervor surrounding the agile philosophy, made us question whether the adoption of agile methodologies has an effect on information systems built, and in particular, the quality of the IS developed. In this paper we construct a conceptual model, conduct a survey of software developers, and analyze our results, which support our hypotheses about the importance of the strategic selection of a development methodology. We conclude that practicing project managers should consider the decision to use certain methodologies as part of the strategic process.

Leaning towards agile

Different market conditions require organisations to respond in a variety of ways. The authors suggest that companies within a turbulent market environment will need to operate in a more responsive manner and adopt an agile philosophy. An agile manufacturer can be defined as the fastest to market, with the lowest total cost and the greatest ability to meet varied customer requirements - the final measure being the ability to delight the customer.