A Practical Approach for Deploying Agile Methods Minna Pikkarainen and Outi Salo VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, P.O. Box 1100, FIN-90571 Oulu, Finland
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1 Introduction Over the past years, a great number of organizations have started utilizing agile principles and practices in their software development [1, 2]. Despite of the promising experience reports, the deployment of agile practices is a challenging task which requires adjustment and dedication from all the stakeholders involved in the development process [3, 4]. In order to fit the agile practices into organization’s software development context, agile specific guidelines and methods to support their selection, deployment and tailoring are needed [5]. However, the existing software process improvement (SPI) approaches have originally been targeted for the context of the traditional software development thus lacking some central aspects such as iterative process adaptation [5] and procedures for suitable organizational learning [6]. Agile Assessment and Post-Iteration Workshops (PIWs) are technologies that can be used in the deployment of agile software development methods.
2 Agile Deployment Process and Technologies The agile deployment process proposed here combines Agile Assessment procedures and iterative execution of process adaptation and deployment with PIWs. This provides an opportunity for rapid feedback loop from the project teams to organization. At the moment, one method for assessing agile software development is an Agile Assessment [7, 8]. The approach of Boehm and Turner [9] also provides a way for assessing the agile home ground of a software development project. However, this model maintains a strict focus on assessing the agile and plan-driven risks rather than finding the weaknesses and strengths of the used practices. The new idea in the Agile Assessment approach is to make the agile principles and practices a part of the assessment process and to use the generated information for improving the software development processes, utilizing agility-based solution alternatives. The iterative process adaptation within agile project teams provides project teams with a means of iterative tailoring the deployed practices during the ongoing project. The PIW method (e.g., [10]) proposes a way to conduct this activity in a rapid yet validated and systematic manner. Furthermore, the PIW method provides mechanisms for organizations to harvest and utilize SPI feedback from process deployment in projects to organizational learning [5, 6], e.g., in Agile Assessments. Both Agile Assessments and PIWs have been successfully performed for several projects in many organizations (e.g. Agile Assessment in 8 projects in Hantro, Nokia and F-Secure and PIWs in 8 Mobile-D™ case projects). Based on the results, the P. Abrahamsson, M. Marchesi, and G. Succi (Eds.): XP 2006, LNCS 4044, pp. 213 – 214, 2006. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006
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Agile Assessment has found to be an objective, lightweight approach which provides evidences of the agile technologies performance, know-how about available and suitable agile practices as well as practical, agile improvement ideas. PIWs have offered to the project teams with systematic mechanisms of effective process adaptation and organizations with an opportunity to effectively learn from the project teams conducting agile deployment.
3 Conclusions Currently, the agile software development methods provide an attractive alternative to the traditional plan-driven software development approaches. Specific procedures are, however, needed to support a systematic selection and deployment of new agile practices as well as for tailoring them to suit individual projects. The presented agile deployment approach integrates the specific Agile Assessment and Post-Iteration Workshop technologies offering practical solutions to answer these needs.
References [1] B. Greene, "Agile Methods Applied to Embedded Firmware Development," Agile Development Conference, Salt-Lake city, 2004. [2] J. Highsmith, Agile Project Management, Creating innovative products: Addison-Wesley, 2004. [3] M. Cohn and D. Ford, "Introducing an Agile Process to an Organization," IEEE Software, vol. 36, pp. 74-78, 2003. [4] H. Svensson and M. Höst, "Introducing an Agile Process in a Software Maintenance and Evolution Organization," 9th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, 2005. [5] M. Pikkarainen, O. Salo, and J. Still, "Deploying Agile Practices in Organizations: A Case Study," EuroSPI 2005, Budapest, Hungary, 2005. [6] O. Salo and P. Abrahamsson, "Integrating Agile Software Development and Software Process Improvement: a Longitdinal Case Study," ISESE 2005, Autralia, Noosa Heads, 2005. [7] M. Pikkarainen and U. Passoja, "An Approach for Assessing Suitability of Agile Solutions:A Case Study," XP 2005, Sheffield University, UK, 2005. [8] M. Pikkarainen and A. Mäntyniemi, "An Approach for Using CMMI in Agile Software Development Assessments: Experiences from Three Case Studies," SPICE 2006, 2005. [9] B. Boehm and R. Turner, "Balancing Agility and Discipline," in Balancing Agility and Discipline -A Guide for the Perplexed: Addison Wesley, 2003. [10] O. Salo, "Improving Software Process in Agile Software Development Projects: Results from Two XP Case Studies," EUROMICRO 2004, Rennes, France, 2004.
