Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Agile methods focus on customer satisfaction and delivering business value early, however if flexibility and adaptability are not managed during the development project, agile methods could not assure achieving the overall business expectations. Customers require risk visibility over the main aspects that define its expectations: functionality (scope), budget, time-to-market, and product quality. These risks must be controlled and monitored during the project in order to introduce mitigation actions if needed. In this article, we propose an agile commitments framework based on the definition and follow-up of commitments between customer and developer. This framework aims to improving risk management by enhancing business expectation risk visibility, and also providing a negotiation baseline between customers and developers.

The current agile software development methods do not seem to address usability and interaction design issues enough, i.e., the interaction design process may remain implicit. However, few studies with positive results have been conducted concerning integrating explicit interaction design process into agile software development. In this study, the interaction design process of Mobile-D^TM is extended with the personas approach. Empirical evaluation of the resulting model is performed in a case project. The results provide view points for both industrial and scientific purposes on the applications of interaction design activities in different stages of agile development process.

This paper highlights the important aspect of IT governance, with the objective of defining an unaddressed aspect of agile governance, by the application of an iterative, inductive, instantaneous analysis and emergent interpretation of appropriate data-grounded conceptual categories of IT governance. An effective agile governance approach will facilitate the achievement of desired discipline, rationale, business value, improved performance, monitoring, as well as control of large agile software development environments by aligning business goals and agile software development goals.

The development of new products requires the generation of one or more novel and useful ideas, suitable to implementation in practice. In our research, the agile method eXtreme Programming (XP) is analyzed, evaluated and enhanced from the perspective of the creativity. We believe that a better understanding of concepts related to creative teams (structure, performance and purposes) offers important insights about the use of agile methods in general and XP in particular.

Prior to the turn of the century, long-standing approaches to software development (see, for example, [1], [2], [3]) provided the models and process heuristics for developing software in industry, but since the late 1990s, these traditional approaches have been challenged by agile methods. But why do practitioners choose to adopt agile approaches, especially given the dearth of any hard empirical evidence as to its efficacy in specific contexts? [4]

Since Agile methods were presented in the 90s, many papers, articles and books have been published about Agile. However, little work focuses on Agile Software Quality. Therefore, the main goal of the PhD is to study the quality of Agile projects.

This experience report talks about applying agile tools, namely, user stories and acceptance tests, to resolve problems in offshore software development. These tools help to formulate and to better understand results and goals of projects, and to avoid miscommunications about expectations. The report shows the importance of discussing technical project limitations.

From July 2005 to August 2006, a bioinformatics project experienced a substantial transformation by adopting Scrum and some XP practices. The paper reveals project risks, previous challenges faced by the team and results from this one-year exploratory case study. The paper presents a discussion of the lessons learned from the perspective of both the project manager and the on-site agile advisor, and recommendations on speeding up the adoption process for other projects.

In Test-Driven development, first test is made according to the customer requirement and then code is prepared to execute this test successfully. In this approach, design is not done exclusively before preparing test cases and coding. Design emerges as software evolves but this may result in lack of design quality. We adapted TDD by incorporating exclusive architectural design phase in the successful implementation of an innovative, large scale, complex project.

In Italy the public adoption of agile practices in software planning, design and development is still in an infancy state. Local XPUGs are few – notably, the most active ones are in the cities of Milan and Rome. After an informal meeting of the participants of the first edition of ESSAP, the Varese XP-UG was born in 2006, October. This XP-UG is the first experience in Italy spread from an academic environment with specific learning purposes, applying agile methods in an advanced education setting in computer sciences. In particular, preliminary observations of a University ad hoc open source web application called Examinando are given.