Agile development methods are becoming increasingly important to face continuously changing requirements. Nevertheless, the adoption of such methods in industrial environments still needs to be fostered. Companies call for tools to keep under (quantitative) control both agility and coordination of IT teams. In this paper, we report on an empirical case study aiming at enabling real com-panies migrating from waterfall to Agile software development process. Our re-search effort has been spent in introducing 11 different IT small and medium-sized enterprises to Agile methods and to observe them executing real business projects. To have a common evaluation framework, we selected a set of 61 met-rics, with the purpose of monitoring and measuring the evolution towards Agile methods of each company involved in the experiment. In the paper, we provide readers with empirical data on companies’ feedback. We report on two different categories of real insights into what the companies are doing: (i) the metrics they consider to be useful and/or directly exploitable by product lines beyond the theoretical definitions; (ii) the tools and strategies they are adopting and connecting to existing development environments to easily collect data from the metrics, and evaluate quantitative improvements in the Agile methods.
A Case Study to Enable and Monitor Real IT Companies Migrating from Waterfall to Agile
CAPODIECI, ANTONIO;MAINETTI, LUCA;MANCO, LUIGI
2014-01-01
Abstract
Agile development methods are becoming increasingly important to face continuously changing requirements. Nevertheless, the adoption of such methods in industrial environments still needs to be fostered. Companies call for tools to keep under (quantitative) control both agility and coordination of IT teams. In this paper, we report on an empirical case study aiming at enabling real com-panies migrating from waterfall to Agile software development process. Our re-search effort has been spent in introducing 11 different IT small and medium-sized enterprises to Agile methods and to observe them executing real business projects. To have a common evaluation framework, we selected a set of 61 met-rics, with the purpose of monitoring and measuring the evolution towards Agile methods of each company involved in the experiment. In the paper, we provide readers with empirical data on companies’ feedback. We report on two different categories of real insights into what the companies are doing: (i) the metrics they consider to be useful and/or directly exploitable by product lines beyond the theoretical definitions; (ii) the tools and strategies they are adopting and connecting to existing development environments to easily collect data from the metrics, and evaluate quantitative improvements in the Agile methods.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
