Agile Development Methods and Component-Orientation

Abstract

Agile software development methods have been proposed as the way to address the problem of delivering high-quality software on time under constantly and rapidly changing requirements in business and IT environments. An agile development process is characterized by extensive coding practice, intensive communication between stakeholders, fast iterative cycles, small and flexible teams, and minimal efforts in system modeling and architectural design. This paper presents the state-of-the-art of agile methods and analyzes them along the selected criteria that highlight different aspects of their theory and practice. Certain limitations of agile methods are identified. The chapter presents the component paradigm as a way of balancing traditional (model-driven or plan-driven) and agile development, depending on the project settings. Service-based component concepts applied at the level of modeling, architectural design and development can ensure and strengthen agile development principles and practices, and at the same time introduce necessary agility to more traditional development. By using components, the software development process can easily scale in size, robustness, and the level of details. This provides an effective balance between the requirements for agility in software development and needs for a disciplined, design-driven way of building complex software.

A Survey of Development Methods for Semantic Web Service Systems

“…Many methods for engineering of information systems in general or SOS in general, e.g., (Stojanovic et al, 2004) might be useful for the engineering of SWS systems. This might especially be true for methods supporting modeling and elicitation of requirements, such as interviewing, workshops, etc.…”

“…The service concept elevates the abstraction level and aims at empowering business users to create and execute software systems based on SOA (Erl, 2005;Stojanovic et al, 2004). Many technology standards for SOS and Web Services-systems have emerged, but little attention has been given to methods for modeling and designing such systems (Cabral et al, 2004).…”