Emerging Innovations in Agile Software Development >

Book
IGI Global, 2016

Emerging Innovations in Agile Software Development focuses on using agile methodologies to manage, design, develop, test, and maintain software projects. Emphasizing research-based solutions for contemporary software development, this book is designed for software developers, researchers, and graduate-level students in software engineering and project management programs.

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Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World >

Book
Manning, 2009

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Many books discuss agile from a theoretical or academic perspective. Becoming Agile takes a different approach, explaining agile from a case-study perspective. Agile principles are discussed, explained, and demonstrated in the context of a case study that flows throughout the book, based on a mixture of the author's real-world experiences.

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25 Percent Ahead of Schedule & Just at Step 2 of the SAMI > 

Whitepaper
Proceedings of the 2009 Agile Conference, IEEE Computer Society, 2009

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The Sidky Agile Measurement Index (SAMI) is a five-step, value-based roadmap to agility. SAMI is designed to help organizations become more agile, with five steps—collaborative, evolutionary, integrated, adaptive, and encompassing—that aim to instill a new value in teams and organizations.

 

This report shows how an organization at step two of the SAMI has already realized tangible business benefits: 25% increase in the speed to market, 45% fewer bugs reported after delivery of the system, unprecedented customer satisfaction, and 19% less employee turnover because of higher team moral.
 

 

Value-Driven Agile Adoption: Improving An Organization's Software Development Approach >

Whitepaper
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, Volume 182: "New Trends in Software Methodologies, Tools and Techniques," 2008

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More organizations are trying to adopt agile practices without the necessary education on how or why to choose a particular practice. Such applications tend to be band aid-type approaches that, more often than not, can only deliver a one-time fix that can't address symptomatic problems. This approach itself is also problematic because it fails to convey the rationales and principles necessary to accommodate future changes.

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In response to this disquieting trend, a Value-Driven Agile Adoption (VDAA) approach proposes three value-based components when introducing agile practices. These three components represent values defined by the agile community, corporate identity, and business objectives. Considering each requires rationalizing whether or not to include some practices and exclude others. The VDAA approach embraces the philosophy that agile is more than just a development process: It can help organizations respond to both short- and long-term changes.

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A Structured Approach to Adopting Agile Practices: The Agile Adoption Framework >

Ph.D. Dissertation
Virginia Tech, 2007

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Many organizations try to adopt agile processes to take advantage of its numerous benefits, including (but not limited to) a quicker return on investment, better software quality, and higher customer satisfaction. To date, however, no structured process—at least none published in the public domain—guides organizations in adopting agile practices.

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To address this, we present the Agile Adoption Framework and an innovative approach to implementing it. The framework consists of two components: an agile measurement index and a four-stage process. Together, these components guide organizations' efforts to adopt agile. More specifically, the Sidky Agile Measurement Index (SAMI) encompasses five agile levels that are used to identify the agile potential of projects and organizations. The four-stage process, on the other hand, helps determine whether or not organizations are ready for agile adoption and, guided by their potential, what set of agile practices can and should be introduced.

 

To help substantiate the "goodness" of the Agile Adoption Framework, we presented it to various members of the agile community and elicited their responses through questionnaires. The results of that substantiation effort are encouraging and suggest further avenues for improvement.

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A Disciplined Approach to Adopting Agile Practices: The Agile Adoption Framework >
Whitepaper

Journal of Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering (A NASA Journal published by Springer), 2007

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Determining the Applicability of Agile Practices to Mission and Life-Critical Systems >

Whitepaper
31st Annual IEEE / NASA Software Engineering Workshop (SEW-31 2007), 2007

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Adopting agile practices can benefit and improve a system under development. However, in mission and life-critical systems, adopting an inappropriate agile practice can actually harm the system along its lifecycle phases, as well as prevent future benefits.

 

This paper presents a three-stage process that helps organizations identify which agile practices they can benefit from without hurting the mission or life-critical system under development.

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RGML: A markup language for characterizing requirements generation >

Whitepaper
28th Annual IEEE / NASA Software Engineering Workshop (SEW-28 2003)

This paper presents the Requirements Generation Markup Language (RGML), a formal specification mechanism for characterizing the structure, process flow, and activities inherent to the requirements generation process.

 

Within activities, the RGML supports the characterization of application instantiation, the use of templates, and the production of artifacts. The RGML can also describe temporal control within a process as well as conditional expressions that control if and when various activity scenarios will be executed.

 

This language is expressively powerful yet flexible in its characterization capabilities, making it possible to describe a wide spectrum of different requirements generation processes.