Impact of Agile Methodology on Software Development

Abstract

Software development has become a highly consequential activity for the society and many businesses, with most of them investing much resource. They employ various methods to develop software that can maximize their profits, while minimizing the operation costs. However, most of the projects have failed because they are not able to respond to the changing user needs, despite the heavy investment incurred. This has encouraged the software engineers to propose flexible and effective techniques, including agile methodologies that help to develop quality software. The methodology impacts software development because it results in quality products. It influences the developers positively, thus enabling them to commit their efforts in achieving the project objectives. The project managers motivate the team members, which increases their creativity and innovativeness necessary for success of the project. The methodology also employs effective communication strategies, which enable the teams and stakeholders to realize quality software. The increased level of stakeholder engagement helps to determine and address the faults of the project in good time, thus reducing the cost incurred. The paper explains various ways in which agile methodology impacts software development. It also describes benefits and limetations of agile methodology. This paper motivates developers to adopt this methodology in order to develop software that meet their changing needs.

Software Development and CSCW

“…One of the main attraction points of agile development is the flexibility offered and the positive impact that this flexibility has on development activities [15]. Empowering self-directed teams to exercise flexibility increases levels of trust and respect for one another, and can improve performance [16,27].…”

“…The boundaries between the project management and development roles become blurred when there is an expectation for all team members to possess some level of autonomy and heightened responsibility (contrasting with a traditional software development environment) [53]. However, the ability to continually adapt and take ownership of different agile methods has shown to have a positive impact on team members during development activities [15,27]. This allows for team members to innovate with their development process, with the ability to craft processes to create an optimal development cycle.…”

“…Standardization may also make interactions and relationships required for metawork more uniform and consistent, but can reduce choice and in turn, flexibility [34]. Typical hierarchical decision-making structures within an organization can cause resistance from agile teams [15,27]. Identifying the best way to balance flexibility with the top-down impositions of standardizing a single interpretation of agile development across an organization is an area with limited exploration.…”

Preference in using Agile Development with Larger Team Size

“…A large number of authors emphasize that the size of the team, following any variant of agile development methodology, should be kept small. There is a rift between different authors as to how small the team must be to achieve the optimal development results [3] [4]. According previous studies the optimal size of any agile team is up to 15 members while the maximum is around 20 [5].…”

“…However, it is agreed in all of the mentioned papers that the maximum team size should not exceed twenty members. Decrease in lead team size and increasing the morale in the team in agile software development increases the productivity of the whole process [4]. As described in [10] "A successful globally distributed agile team configuration consists of a smaller number of members to facilitate better certain agile practices, such as the daily stand-up meeting, iteration planning, iteration demos, iteration retrospectives, and user stories".…”