Abstract. The appearance of Agile methods has been the most noticeable change to software process thinking in the last fifteen years [16], but in fact many of the "Agile ideas" have been around since 70's or even before. Many studies and reviews have been conducted about Agile methods which ascribe their emergence as a reaction against traditional methods. In this paper, we argue that although Agile methods are new as a whole, they have strong roots in the history of software engineering. In addition to the iterative and incremental approaches that have been in use since 1957 [21], people who criticised the traditional methods suggested alternative approaches which were actually Agile ideas such as the response to change, customer involvement, and working software over documentation. The authors of this paper believe that education about the history of Agile thinking will help to develop better understanding as well as promoting the use of Agile methods. We therefore present and discuss the reasons behind the development and introduction of Agile methods, as a reaction to traditional methods, as a result of people's experience, and in particular focusing on reusing ideas from history.
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In this paper, factor analysis is applied on a set of data that was collected to study the effectiveness of 58 different agile practices. The analysis extracted 15 factors; each was associated with a list of practices. These factors with the associated practices can be used as a guide for agile process improvement. Correlations between the extracted factors were calculated, and the significant correlation findings suggested that people who applied iterative and incremental development and quality assurance practices had a high success rate, that communication with the customer was not very popular as it had negative correlations with governance and iterative and incremental development. Also, people who applied governance practices also applied quality assurance practices. Interestingly success rate related negatively with traditional analysis methods such as Gantt chart and detailed requirements specification.
Abstract-This paper focuses on identifying the important aspects of Agile adoption from software practitioners in Malaysia. We analyse 27 Agile adoption variables from a survey of early Agile users in Malaysia. Factor analysis is conducted to identify the clusters of the variables (or items) and how they are inter-related to produce factors. Most of the respondents are from software organisations in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor; in which most of the companies are located in Malaysia. The clusters of variables resulting from this analysis can serve as a reference to the practitioners planning to adopt the methodology. The top factors identified from this study are shown in terms of (i) developer involvement and organisation-related aspects, (ii) cultural and people related aspects and (iii) customer collaboration and the need for professional skills when using Agile methods. In addition, factor analysis discovered that practitioners disagreed about the importance of the technical aspects of Agile. While we believe that these findings are particularly important from the Malaysian perspective, however, they also help add to the body of evidence in the field of software engineering and software process particularly in terms of Agile methods adoption. Moreover, the study also can help adopters from the nearby geographical regions to understand and see the suitability of Agile methods for their organisations.
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