Case 1: Jharna Software: The move to Agile methods January 20, 2009 Background & Problem Identification Jharna Software is a software company located in India that was established in 1992, with a focus on IT services for the banking and finance sector. Its offerings include e-commerce solutions, networking solutions, offshore services, applications development, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management (CRM), e-CRM and business process outsourcing. Jharna received awards from the Indian government for performance in exports and does well in the market. The founders believe that their high-quality offerings at low price points is the key to their success, helped by their focus on maintaining a highly-skilled work …show more content…
Each section indicates a (+) next to the process of preference for the given criteria. Processes address the issue of difficult integration at the customer site: This is an issue for current processes because there are often incomplete system requirements at the start of development and because requirements may change and the process is not set up to adapt to late-breaking changes. Agile processes address this by dividing integration into chunks throughout the process, allowing changes to be made without drastically impacting the design. (+) Ability to meet customer needs: The current development process devotes a large amount of time at the front end of development to establishing customer needs and converting them into system level requirements. The client-site team meets with customers, learns their needs, develops specifications, verifies them with the customers, and then sends them offshore for development. This is a very formalized, documented process. (+) Agile processes do not devote much time up front to formal system specifications, but rather relies on continuous communication with the customer throughout the development process. The process accounts for the fact that needs often change or cannot be fully developed early on and is flexible to this. (+) Compatibility with teams located at multiple sites The current development process has been structured to work well
Redesigning the software development process in an effective way helps in solving many problems. Upon asking question about when exactly the redesign is needed, it is quite obvious that in certain conditions where the involvement by the team and the management is sincere yet the difficulties exist and continue to increase even after a good effort on the particular problem. This has been the same situation in the Jharna Software where the company is privileged with good staff yet they face the problem in the integration stage and also they face difficulty with the suggestions or the changes by the customer on their requirement at later stages.
Thus, Agile came into play. This is a faster and smaller method over traditional. Stakeholders get together with small teams to look at cost, resources and expected time frames. This team figures out the computer verbiage, checks and balances, verification coding, iterations, number limits, scripts, all in the early stages of development.
customer. The first paper focus Agile itself and uses Extreme Programming as an example to show how
In this paper, we are going to analyze the most widely known method of project management; agile project management. Agile has gained an enormous amount of popularity in the world of software development over the last few years due to benefits like increased business value and faster ROI, improved visibility and lower development costs, greater ability to respond to requested changes and decreased risk in solution delivery. The Agile Method ensures that value is optimized throughout the development process. The use of iterative planning and feedback results in teams that can continuously align a delivered product that reflects the desired needs of a client. It easily adapts to changing requirements throughout the process by measuring and evaluating the status of a project. The measuring and evaluating allows accurate and early visibility into the progress of each project.
The Agile development focuses on the interaction and coordination among the developers and customers. The software engineering in this philosophy motivates or improves customer satisfaction, software delivery, small project teams – consisting software engineers and the stakeholders, informal methods, and minimal software engineering work products, delivering operational software on time that has improved analysis and design. This operational software increment is considered as an important work product.
Agile method is relied on business involvement. It increased the responsibilities and burdens for business people. On the other hand, customers need to involve in agile method because agile method is based on the requirements that is given by customers. (Sharma, Sarkar & Gupta, 2012) Developers will usually hold a regular meeting for each deliverable, such as weekly meeting. So the team members can communicate and summarize their work. At this time, customers need to provide feedbacks on the iteration and they need to find out is there any changes are needed. (Yu, Loo, Tham & Tan, 2012) Agile method is focuses on
Agile methodology is for a task that needs great deftness in necessities. The key components of Agile are its short-termed conveyance cycles (sprints), Agile necessities, dynamic group society, less prohibitive task control and concentrate on real-time communication.
The paper is a case study analysis of 16 US software development organizations that adopt agile methodologies. The authors aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of this approach based on the detailed analysis of its practices and how it impact different risk area in the realm of Requirement Engineering (RE). The use of traditional Requirement Engineering recommendations and guidelines in agile development is most of the time problematic and infeasible. These challenges have resulted in the use of different agile practices. The empirical study has identified six agile practices: (1) face-to-face communication over written formal specifications. (2) The iterative nature of requirement engineering process. Only
Agile methods are one of the most recently conceived methodologies for developing software intensive systems. Agile methods refer to a family of methods that tend to favor working code over documentation, individuals over tools, collaboration over negotiation and thriving in volatile environments over following a plan ("Agile Manifesto" 2001). However, agile methods are not indicated for all projects; project managers, with organizational support, must decide if agile methods will provide the most benefit over conventional software engineering methods for developing new software intensive projects.
The effectiveness of the agile approach within a company is relative to the ability in which processes and procedures can be adjusted to better fit its needs. A key factor for adopting successful agile is through the encouragement of a constantly changing environment where changes can happen frequently, become accepted as the norm, and be easily integrated into the process. Process formalities are frequently revised to meet the needs within SeisWare. As a case scenario there was a point in time dedicated for bug fixing during the release cycle which
Collecting the requirements from client and then analyze the requirements then design the document and prototype and then to the development of the code after that it releases to the Quality Assurance to identify the defects and then resolve the defects or bugs by the development team and retest by the Quality Assurance and then submit the process to the client and then to the user for collecting the feedback and enhancement from the customer then if necessary changes are again made by the development team which is again processed to the quality assurance team to identify bugs then the bugs should be resolved and retest by the QA team if the client is satisfied with the process that can be released to the market and we can eliminate most of the defects at the initial stage.
These are some reason that traditional processes replace agile processes mainly in small and simple projects. This is happening because of traditional methods’ limitations and deficiencies, which includes a slow adaptation to business requirements changes, and a tendency to go over budget and as well as behind schedule. The traditional methods also lack in providing improvements in simplicity, productivity and reliability phenomena’s. Despite of these limitations, traditional methods are widely used by many software developers in projects. Traditional methods are capable to provide high assurance, predictability, and stability and their nature is structural, straightforward, and methodological. Agile processes mainly focus on incremental as well as iterative development. Also, frequent deliveries after each sprints and customer collaboration are key element of Agile. Agile process has many advantage such as short lifecycle, low bug-rate, high customer satisfaction, and fast adaptation to changing requirements.
Conventional heavyweight, document-driven software development methods can be characterized as extensive planning, codified process, reuse, heavy documentation and big design up front. These are some reason that conventional methods have been replaced by lightweight agile software development methods mostly in small-scale and relatively simple projects. This phenomenon is mainly due to the conventional methods’ shortcomings, including a slow adaptation to rapidly changing business requirements, and a tendency to be over budget and behind schedule The conventional methods also have not able to provide dramatic improvements in productivity, reliability, and simplicity. Despite the existing shortcomings, the conventional methods are still widely used in industry, particularly, for large-scale projects. Conventional methods come with their straightforward, methodical, and structured nature, as well as their capability to provide predictability, stability, and high assurance. Agile software development methods focus on iterative and incremental development, customer collaboration, and frequent delivery through a light and fast development life cycle. There are many positive benefits of the agile approaches.
When assessing the reason “the field is young”, one may surmise that newer developers may adopt more modern methodologies. Agile modeling came about after more traditional practices. However, less experienced developers may lean toward a more known and proven theory like the waterfall approach which uses successive phases to be completed and finalized. The waterfall is rigid but more predictable and may be easier to manage for new project managers. Using different types of techniques may confuse a
Over the last several years, agile software development processes have become increasingly popular. According to Fowler (2003), the agile software engineering processes attempt to enable more flexible and adaptive software development than the traditional software engineering processes offer.