Adoption Of Agile Practices Research Articles

System dynamics modelling of the impact of agile practice on the quality of continuous delivery projects

The adoption of agile practices in software projects has been faced with scepticism by practitioners, with concerns about the actual effectiveness of these practices. Using system dynamics, this study investigates the impact of four popular agile practices, Test-Driven Development, Pair Programming, On-site Customer Involvement and Pair Testing, on the quality of continuous delivery projects. The developed system dynamic model, called the predictive continuous delivery model, was developed with an extensive use of existing literature, supported by survey, interviews, historical data and expert’s judgement. Simulation results showed all the investigated agile practices except pair programming have a significant impact on the quality of continuous delivery projects.

Favorability conditions in the adoption of agile method practices for software development in a public banking

The main purpose of this paper is to propose and test a model to assess the degree of conditions favorability in the adoption of agile methods to develop software where traditional methods predominate. In order to achieve this aim, a survey was applied on software developers of a Brazilian public retail bank. Two different statistical techniques were used in order to assess the quantitative data from the closed questions in the survey. The first, exploratory factorial analysis validated the structure of perspectives related to the agile model of the proposed assessment. The second, frequency distribution analysis to categorize the answers. Qualitative data from the survey opened question were analyzed with the technique of qualitative thematic content analysis. As a result, the paper proposes a model to assess the degree of favorability conditions in the adoption of Agile practices within the context of the proposed study.

Evaluating the impact of an agile transformation: a longitudinal case study in a distributed context

Many software-development organizations have recently started to adopt agile practices in order to benefit from the improvements they clearly bring, in terms of production speed and software quality, for example. However, in a large, distributed organization, such as Nokia Siemens Networks, an agile transformation may be a long-term, complex process, and therefore, evaluating the benefits achieved, and measuring the success of the change, can be difficult, especially in the early phases of the transformation. This paper is based on the results of a case study on the impact introducing agile practices actually had in a large, software-development organization, part of Nokia Siemens Networks. The impact of this agile transformation was evaluated in terms of how well it succeeded in achieving the goals set by the management before the transformation started. This longitudinal study included two separate analyses, made at 6 monthly intervals, which measured what agile practices were really in use in the organization, and what effects, if any, were visible in terms of the goals which had been set by the management The 6 monthly analyses included defect data metrics and opinion surveys of the personnel directly involved in the transformation. The study showed two things: firstly, that the introduction of agile practices does have the beneficial effects that one would expect, and secondly, that, using this kind of study, it is not only possible to evaluate the impact that the adoption of agile practices has in a large, established software-development company, but also that the effects are visible at a surprisingly early stage.

AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF SOFTWARE METRICS FOR ASSESSING THE PHASES OF AN AGILE PROJECT

We present an analysis of the evolution of a Web application project developed with object-oriented technology and an agile process. During the development we systematically performed measurements on the source code, using software metrics that have been proved to be correlated with software quality, such as the Chidamber and Kemerer suite and Lines of Code metrics. We also computed metrics derived from the class dependency graph, including metrics derived from Social Network Analysis. The application development evolved through phases, characterized by a different level of adoption of some key agile practices — namely pair programming, test-based development and refactoring. The evolution of the metrics of the system, and their behavior related to the agile practices adoption level, is presented and discussed. We show that, in the reported case study, a few metrics are enough to characterize with high significance the various phases of the project. Consequently, software quality, as measured using these metrics, seems directly related to agile practices adoption.

Agile software product lines: a systematic mapping study

AbstractBackground: Software product lines and Agile methods have been an effective solution for dealing with the growing complexity of software and handling competitive needs of software organizations. They also share common goals, such as improving productivity, reducing time‐to‐market, decreasing development costs and increasing customer satisfaction. There has been growing interest in whether the integration of Agile and SPL could provide further benefits and solve many of the outstanding issues surrounding software development. Objective: This study investigates the state‐of‐the‐art in Agile SPL approaches, while identifying gaps in current research and synthesizing available evidence. It also provides a basis for a deeper understanding of the issues involved in the integration of Agile and SPL. Method: A mapping study was undertaken to analyze the relation between Agile and SPL methods. A set of four research questions were defined in which the 32 primary studies were evaluated. Results: This study provides insights into the integration of Agile and SPL approaches, it identifies the current gaps in the research, synthesize the available evidence and propose specific Agile methods and practices for integration in SPL. Conclusions: In general, few studies describe the underlying Agile principles being adopted by proposed Agile SPL solutions. The most common Agile practices proposed by the studies came from the XP and Scrum methods, particularly in the pro‐active SPL strategy. We identify certain Agile methods that are being overlooked by the Agile SPL community, and propose specific SPL practices areas suitable for adoption of Agile practices. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Modeling and simulation of open source development using an agile practice

The goal of this work is to study the effects of the adoption of agile practices on open source development. In particular, we started to evaluate the effects of TDD (Test Driven Development) since it is easer to apply in a distributed environment than most other agile practices. In order to reach this goal we used the simulation modeling approach. We developed a simulation model of open source software development process. The model was tuned using data from a real FLOSS project: Apache HTTP Server. To introduce the TDD practice in our FLOSS simulation model, we made some assumptions based on empirical results. The two FLOSS development models (nonTDD and TDD) were compared. The one incorporating the agile practice yields better results in terms of code quality.

A comparative study of lean and agile manufacturing with a related survey of current practices in the UK

In response to changing success factors and environmental pressures, companies are aspiring to break out of mass production and become lean or agile. Whereas performance enhancements of lean practices have been demonstrated, it is now the case that markets have become increasingly characterized by turbulence, a situation in which reliance on lean practices is insufficient, and that survival requires adoption of agile practices. As a result, a comparative study of lean and agile manufacturing with a related survey of current practices in the UK was carried out, the results of which is presented in this paper. The paper explored the threats to lean and the drivers of agile manufacturing. Using data from a questionnaire survey, four hypotheses were tested, which was indicative of the benefits of agile manufacturing. In contrast to their lean counterparts, agile companies paid attention to a wider range of competitive capabilities. They therefore had a lower range of mean scores on competitive capabilities. Independent sample tests of significant difference in business performance measures revealed that the agile companies consistently outperformed their lean competitors on all business performance measures studied. In addition, a wider range of competitive capabilities and performance measures of the agile companies correlated significantly and positively whilst such correlation was observed for only a narrow range of capabilities and performance measures for lean companies. The results suggest that competing simultaneously on multiple competitive capabilities enhance performance better than a rather narrow focus on cost and quality.