Agile Software Process Improvement

Lean Six Sigma Improve Phase Tollgate Templates are a guide to Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, and Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt Projects. Lean Six Sigma Practitioners use the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) Phases. The Lean Six Sigma Improve Phase Tollgate Templates include the most common tools used in the Improve Phase. There are Backup Slides that include the tools and templates of Optional or less often tools. There are guidelines in the notes section. These templates are used to document Lean Six Sigma Projects as they are executed. There are checklists and guides to ensure the Improve Phase is completed and approved before moving to the next process improvement phase. I wish you well on your projects. Steven Bonacorsi, Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt.

With the increasing popularity of Agile Methods, many software organisations are moving away from traditional methods to adopt Agile development methodologies. Instead of being predictive, Agile is rather adaptive and people-focussed. It advocates a ...

In Mobile communications age, the IT environment and IT technology update rapidly. The requirements change is the software project must face challenge. Able to overcome the impact of requirements change, software development risks can be effectively reduced. Agile software development uses the Iterative and Incremental Development (IID) process and focuses on the workable software and client communication. Agile software development is a very suitable development method for handling the requirements change in software development process. In agile development, user stories are the important documents for the client communication and criteria of acceptance test. However, the agile development doesn't pay attention to the formal requirements analysis and artifacts tracability to cause the potential risks of software change management. In this paper, analyzing and collecting the critical quality factors of user stories, and proposes the User Story Quality Measurement (USQM) model. Applied USQM model, the requirements quality of agile development can be enhanced and risks of requirement changes can be reduced.

Emotional intelligence is a key attribute a Scrum Master must possess, especially a solid understanding of self-awareness and team-awareness. This article explores the widely popular method available in understanding the traits of self as well as team members.

Project methodologies have grown with time when there is a need for a project if satisfying that model will have lasted. There are multiple SDLC Models available but no one fits perfectly, as all of them have some drawbacks. Considering a larger organization, where daily productivity, hours of work done, no of resources used, and progress made in the project are monitored on a day to day basis. Picking up the correct SDLC model for the project is very crucial because when the work gets started, there is no way to alter it back. The Agile methodology does it all, it provides matrices, reports, progress, and the backlogs. Everything is being monitored very closely, throughout the development and testing of the product. This paper addresses the problem which is encountered during the testing of an application when a failed test case or defect is added to product backlog since no more fixes can be made to it.

"With the emergence of Agile Software Development technologies, the software community is expecting in a large impact on producing quality.

The main question that each new technology must pass through with success is: How much it’s worth?

This paper propose a model for determining the significance worth of quality into the most used agile methods (eXtreme programming, Scrum, Lean) inspired by the Toyota Production System(TPS).

Keywords: agile methods, software quality, Toyota production system, Extreme Programming, Scrum Methodologies, Lean Software Development."

Il existe une forte perception au sein de l’industrie du développement logiciel voulant qu’une entreprise ou une équipe de développement qui doit se conformer à un modèle de maturité, par exemple le Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), ne peut en même temps être agile.

L’hypothèse de cet essai est que cette perception est en grande partie erronée. L’essai vise à déterminer, par une analyse rigoureuse limitant toute subjectivité apparente, s’il est possible d’établir une concordance entre des objectifs d’un modèle de maturité et des pratiques, soit entre le domaine de processus CMMI Project Planning et les pratiques Scrum.

La mesure de l’atteinte d’un objectif s’établit par la qualification de la rencontre des éléments essentiels avec la production des artefacts de la pratique et par la capacité de prouver cette atteinte. Cette qualification s’effectue entre les pratiques et chacun des éléments composant les objectifs CMMI, représentée sous la forme d’une matrice.

Une fois complétée, l’analyse proposée permet d’affirmer qu’il existe bel et bien une concordance entre certaines pratiques Scrum et les buts préalablement choisis soit, Établir les estimations, Développer un plan de projet et Obtenir l’engagement envers le plan, et ce, même si l'un des éléments du deuxième but, soit la « Liste des dépendances entre les objectifs», n’est que partiellement et indirectement rencontré.

L’exercice même de l’application de la matrice est utile et bénéfique. Il est possible de l’utiliser pour établir une concordance entre les buts CMMI et les pratiques Scrum si, toutefois, il est entendu que ces pratiques fonctionnent en symbiose et qu’une dépendance des pratiques reste à établir afin de déterminer de façon absolue que seules l’une ou l’autre des pratiques ainsi exposées est réellement nécessaire pour atteindre les buts CMMI.

Que ce soit par les définitions ou par la réponse aux questions posées, ou même par le choix des questions, l’intérêt envers la méthode proposée dans le cadre de cet essai est qu’elle s’expose aux critiques et à l’amélioration. La définition des termes peut être débattue ; l’accent est mis sur l’élimination des malentendus et sur la clarification des ambiguïtés qui sont la source de nombreuses frustrations et interprétations douteuses. Finalement, le but ultime de cet essai est d’améliorer le plus possible la méthode proposée.

With the increasing popularity of Agile Methods, many software organisations are moving away from traditional methods to adopt Agile development methodologies. Instead of being predictive, Agile is rather adaptive and people-focussed. It advocates a small and collaborative team that work closely together. But team size is a factor that is in turn constrained by people factors. When implementing Agile, these key factors are often overlooked. This study aims at identifying the underlying people factors to consider when adopting Agile for a team to be effective. The method used is the study of three different sized Agile teams developing products based on the same technologies and using Scrum. Both objective and subjective measures were used and the results are supported by a survey. The results clearly show that for agile methodologies to work well, it is crucial to select the right people for the right team.

Miksi käyttäjät kehittäjinä näkökulma?

Tämä artikkeli käsittelee digitaalisten tuotteiden suunnittelua ja argumentoi sen puolesta että käyttäjät tulisi huomioida kehittäjinä koko prosessin ajan. Itse prosessin käsitteeseen sisältyy näkökulman muutos. Toisin sanoen, prosessin ei katsota omaavan lopetusta, paitsi jos koko tuote hylätään. Prosessi jatkuu koska tuotteen käyttö muuttaa käyttäjien tapoja käyttää tuotetta, merkityksiä tuotetta ja sen käyttöä kohtaan synnyttäen uusia tarpeita tuotetta kohtaan syklisessä liikkeessä. Prosessi on siis jatkuva: käyttäjät muuttavat työkaluja ja työkalut käyttäjiä ja heidän toimintojaan kuten toiminnan teoriassa huomioidaan.
Edellä mainitut asiat eivät ole uusia mutta niiden systemaattinen tarkastelu käyttäjät kehittäjinä näkökulmasta on tarpeen, koska enenevässä määrin työelämä, korkeakoulu ”opetus” ovat heränneet ja aloittaneet muutoksen hyödyntääkseen digitaalista mediaa saavuttaakseen tuottavan ja yhteisöllistä toimivaa yksilöä korostavan toimintatavan. Näissä keskusteluissa varsinkin avoimen (vapaan) lähdekoodikehityksen (FLOSS) ideologiaa ja toimintatapoja on tuotu esille mahdollisena ratkaisuna käyttäjien tuomiseen mukaan ja sitouttamiseen suunnittelu ja kehitysprosesseihin. Tällaisten toimintapajojen omaksumisen uskotaan tuovan mukanaan innovatiivisuutta ja säästöjä tuotekehityksessä ja lisäarvona käyttäjäystävällisempiä tuotteita.
Jatkuvan muutoksen huomioon ottaminen vaatii toiminnan teorian ideoiden mukaan ottamista suunnitteluprosessin, analyysin ja loppukäyttäjien huomioimiseen kehittäjän ominaisuudessa koko prosessissa. Lisäksi viitekehykseen tulisi tuoda mukaan semioottisia laadullisia menetelmiä analysoimaan toimintaa, käytäntöjä ja merkityksiä holistisesti ottaen huomioon ihmisten sosiaalisen toimintaympäristön ja institutionaaliset, organisatoriset ja tekniset infrastruktuurit. Artikkeli antaa ensin katsauksen käyttäjäkeskeisen suunnittelun pääperiaatteisiin, sen jälkeen pohditaan käyttäjät kehittäjinä näkökulmaa avoimen lähdekoodikehityksen kautta ja viimeisenä etsitään mentelmiä miten jo konventionaaliset käyttäjäkeskeiset ja nousevat käyttäjät kehittäjinä menetelmät voitaisiin yhdistää toivoen, että tuloksena olisi holistisempi tapa ottaa huomioon käytännöt, muutos ja tuotteiden kehitys.

It’s a great resource for someone with a modest amount of professional programming experience and a basic knowledge of data structures and algorithms. Bentley covers a wide range of topics relevant to the working programmer, including multiple chapters with case studies of algorithmic development from Bentley’s life as a professional developer, a chapter on the importance of choosing the right data structure(s) for your program, program performance/tuning, and finally a number of chapters that discuss specific algorithms and data structures.

Requirements are descriptions of the services that a software system must provide and the constraints under which it must operate Requirements can range from high-level abstract statements of services or system constraints to detailed mathematical functional specifications Requirements Engineering is the process of establishing the services that the customer requires from the system and the constraints under which it is to be developed and operated

The theme of the software that we have been developing is a combination of Mobile Solutions and Leveraging Geo data and Maps to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful to a wider and better extent. Our project is a mobile application that allows the user to download and install street maps of a particular city, state or country depending on his current needs from a site .The downloaded maps can be browsed offline by the user and the user can download new maps or update the existing ones whenever he feels the need to do so. The downloaded maps will be dynamic giving the user the feel as if he is browsing the maps online. The user's current location will be shown on the map using the cell tower info that is provided by all the cell network providers thus making the application usage completely independent of internet service. The downloaded maps will not be like some image of a street map but like a fully functional and active map that allows the user to search for a particular place like some mall, or some spot for tourist interest by just speaking the name of the place which will be processed by the speech recognition system which is a great feature of our application specially useful for people who don't know how to read or write in English .The result produced by the application will be a shortest by road route to the place which will be highlighted on the map ,the distance and the estimate cost of reaching there by a cab or a bus service, any transportation means like a bus stand or a taxi stand in the close vicinity of the users current location will be highlighted in the map. The cursor on the map indicating the user's current location will move along with the user as he travels thus providing him real time information of his location.

Agile innovation methods have revolutionized information technology. Over the past 25 to 30 years, they have significantly increased success rates in software development, improved quality, and speed to market, and boosted the motivation and productivity of IT teams. Now agile methodologies—which involve new values, principles, practices, and benefits and are a radical alternative to command-and-control-style management—are spreading across a broad range of industries and functions and even into the C-suite.

This paper presents the case of John Deere, which uses agile methodologies to develop new software for its machines. It introduces the necessity of faster development and rapid customer feedbacks to increase company value. In the same way, is presented some modifications they introduced during implementation and the results. Finally, the paper presents a framework for implementing agile in the organization as a whole.

Agile Transformations require organizational commitment and a high level of process maturity. SCi has undertaken the same change internally and within projects we execute for our customers. We are highly qualified to guide organizations through this cultural transformation. SCi incorporates Agile principles within our vision and mission. All corporate and commercial functions employ the same Agile approach for managing the work. The key lesson learned from our decade-long adoption of Agile principles is that Agile requires a sound structure to operate within, and a robust management foundation. The management foundation we employ, and recommend for our customers, is the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI). Our Agile approach has been independently appraised at CMMI maturity level 4. CMMI can be used to guide process improvement across a project, a division, or an entire organization.

Today’s financial institutions face multiple complexities in the business environment—from multi-faceted decision-making, increasing data volumes, need for real time analytics, complex event processing, interfacing with social media, support for mobility and emerging regulatory requirements to rapidly changing customer expectations. The current business processes are unable to address these emerging challenges. They lack agility, process visibility, and real-time decision making capabilities. To overcome these challenges, increase profit and gain competitive advantage insurance company need to re-invent all business process in such a way to improve productivity and reduce cost. The researcher is convinced that for African Alliance Insurance to gain competitive advantage over other players in the market, she needs to do more than just improving productivity and reducing cost; the ultimate destination is to attain operational excellence. This research therefore hope to create and set the destination, document, redesign and communicate the company processes to all staff, ensure the flow of value to the customer is known by all and put process in place to fix it before it collapse.

Continuous delivery (CD) has emerged as an auspicious alternative to traditional release engineering, promising to provide the capability to release valuable software continuously to customers. Paddy Power has been implementing CD for the past two years. This article explains why Paddy Power decided to adopt CD, describes the resulting CD capability, and reports the huge benefits and challenges involved. These experiences can provide fellow practitioners with insights for their adoption of CD, and the identified challenges can provide researchers valuable input for developing their research agendas.

The demand for medical device software continues to grow and there is an associated increase in its importance and complexity. This paper discusses medical device software process assessment and improvement. It outlines Medi SPICE, a software process assessment and improvement model which is being developed to meet the specific safety critical and regulatory requirements of the medical device domain. It also details the development of a subset of the Medi SPICE process reference model for inclusion in the next release of the IEC 62304 standard: Medical device software
Software Life Cycle processes. IEC 62304 is a key standard for medical device software development and is approved by many national regulatory bodies including the Food and Drug Administration in the United States and the European Union. This paper also outlines 3 lightweight software process assessment methods which have been developed in tandem with Medi SPICE. Finally the time line for the release of the full Medi SPICE model is provided.

Software development paradigms help a software developer to select appropriate strategies to develop software projects. They include various methods, procedures, and tools to describe and define the software development life cycle (SDLC). The waterfall and iterative models are two useful development paradigms, which have been used by various software developers in the last decades. This paper proposes a new software development methodology, called waterative model, which applies an integration of the waterfall and iterative development paradigms. In this model, the iterative model is embedded into the waterfall model to use the advantages of both models as an integrated one. It, in the most cases, is appropriate for large software products that need a long-term period of time for the development process. Experimental results demonstrate that the customer satisfaction score could be high by using the proposed model in various software projects.

The dictionary meaning of Agile is to be able to move quickly and easily. Agile can be sketched as the ability to adapt and respond to change. It is about dealing with, and succeeding in, a turbulent environment. It is about understanding what is going on in the environment, identifying the uncertainty you face, and figuring out how to adapt. The Agile Manifesto authors chose "Agile" because it represented the adaptiveness and response to change, crucial to their approach.

Scrum is Scrum, and it’s a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, Scrum has been described/defined in many different, inconsistent and incoherent ways. Scrum 3.0 is a description of Scrum that both unifies and extends older descriptions of Scrum, and is easier to relate to real world scenarios. Scrum 3.0 is the cleanest, most flexible and most agile version of Scrum there is...

Abstract— Current Agile methodology doesn’t put into consideration the effect of the variability of skills required to perform the tasks of the project. Furthermore, it does not account. In advance, for the availability of those skills among the agile team of the developers at the proper time they are needed. Narrow view of current sprint requirements and their tasks hide the future need of those skills, hence wasting valuable resources that might have been used in earlier stages of the development. Consequently, a waste of resources usually exist that needed to be accounted for in every Agile project using the current methodologies. The proposed CESP process will have global project view that will help to eliminate waste of resources in those earlier stages by rearranging the tasks that will required in earlier stages. Hence, reduces the overall projects time and cost. All that while maintaining the agility and flexibility desired by adopting the Agile methodology. The main objective of our paper is reduces the overall projects time and cost. All that while maintaining the agility and flexibility desired by adopting the agile methodology.

KEYWORDS- Agile;Scrum; Kanban;Scrumban; Scrumbanfall ; L-Scrumban ,Cost,Efficiency

International Conference on Emerging Practices in Software Process & Architecture (SOFTPA 2022) is an emerging practice in Software Development life cycle adopted by various software organizations to develop an environment of continuous deployment and delivery within time. There are several software development processes that practice the concept of continuous improvement and automation to maintain the operational stability and smooth flow of software delivery.

One common and essential characteristic of a project, is that it is a temporary endeavor, to achieve certain outcomes (deliverables) and to help achieve organizational/stakeholders’ objectives, with defined beginning and end. Methodologies applied in projects, tends to directly influence the efficiency and effectiveness of project outcomes. Consequently, affecting the cost, quality, scope, time and outcomes. Mistakes happens regardless of the methodology applied. The first rule in project management is that “Nothing goes as you plan” (Firend, Al. R., 2019).

Methodology is defined as “strictly defined combination of logically related practices, methods, and processes that determine how best to plan, develop, control and deliver a project throughout the continuous implementation processes until successful completion and termination.” (MyManagementGuide). There are numerous definitions of methodology in project management. However, there is a shared fundamental principle across all definitions.  That is, methodology in project management helps project managers direct the project, and keep it in track. Methodology help organizations to achieve outcomes that aligned with strategic objectives. This is especially true when considering that projects are expensive, changing and time consuming in nature.

All projects have three main components that a Project Manager (PM) constantly struggle with; cost, time, and quality. Various approaches to project methodology are the means of organizing and directing projects.  These components are limitations that shape projects in the form of outcomes, deadlines and resources. As such, choosing the right methodology help achieve desired objectives and set outcomes in a most efficient and effective manner. There are six common types of project management methodologies. Each part will be discussed with explanation of its sub-parts.

This body of work is written while working in California’s Silicon Valley as project manager, and teaching project management to MBA students. The intent of this work is to clarify the various methodologies applied in project management and simply these concepts to those learning project management, and to those studying it. A study on critical success factors has been included at the end of this book to illustrate the importance of culture and the role cultural values play in defining project successes and failures for the benefit of the reader.

This paper presents a case study of Agile Scrum process followed in Retail Domain project. This paper also reveals the impacts of Cost of Software Quality, when agile scrum process is not followed efficiently. While analyzing the case study, the gaps were found and guidelines for process improvements were also
suggested in this paper.

—Selecting the right method, right personnel and right practices, and applying them adequately, determine the success of software development. In this paper, a qualitative study is carried out among the critical factors of success from previous studies. The factors of success match with their relative principles to illustrate the most valuable factor for agile approach success, this paper also prove that the twelve principles poorly identified for few factors resulting from qualitative and quantitative past studies. Dimensions and Factors are presented using Critical success Dimensions and Factors Mind Map Model.

This study aims to investigate the perceptions of software professionals in relation with impact of agile practices to accelerate the delivery of software products. Quantitative data obtained from a sample of 109 professionals were collected and analyzed by Pearson correlation and factor analysis. The results of factor analysis showed that the perception of professionals in relation to agile practices can be grouped into seven factors. From the correlation analysis, it was observed that customer satisfaction is the main variable influencing the perceptions of professionals regarding the use of agile practices to meet the deadlines on software projects.

As agile software development principles and methods are being adopted by large software product organizations it is important to understand the role of software entropy. That is, how the maintainability of a system may degrade over time due to continuous change. This may on one side affect the ability to act agile in planning and development. On the other side, an agile process may affect growth of entropy. We report from a case study of a successful software product line organization that has adopted the agile development method Evo, showing how agility and entropy are negatively related. We conclude this study by suggesting a two-step approach to manage entropy while maintaining process agility. First, the system needs to be restructured to establish a level of manageable entropy, and then, that the agile process must be complemented with continuous semi-automated quality monitoring and refactoring support.

Agile software development or agility is a sound concept of today's scenario which comprises the methods like scrum, Kanban, pair programming, extreme programming etc...Agile methods work with collaboration, competence, predictive planning and achievement and so that they let a project to be completed in its optimum state i.e. within time and cost and with producing best results. Agile methods are not bound to apply only in field of software development but they can be used in each and every field for getting best results in least efforts. This paper is an attempt to provide a study on agile methods as well as the chances to use them in other fields of engineering.

With the release of the latest European Medical Device Directive (MDD) standalone software can now be classified as an active medical device. Consequently the methods used to ensure device safety and reliability needs to be reviewed. IEC 62304 is the current software development lifecycle framework followed by medical device software developers but important processes are beyond the scope of IEC 62304. These processes are covered by additional standards. However since the MDD became mandatory these additional standards are not comprehensive enough to ensure the reliability of an active medical device consisting of only software. By employing software process improvement techniques this software can be developed and validated to ensure it performs the required task in a safe and reliable way.

In computing, starvation refers to the scenario when a process does not get required resources to complete its work. This mainly happens due to very simple priority based scheduling algorithms. Issues in software development require resources too and which issue will get the required resources depend on its priority. So the question is: Does starvation occur in Software Development too? The authors tried to answer the question with the help of their prepared dataset named as “Redmine Dataset”. Redmine is one of the popular web-based project management tool as well as an Issue Tracking Systems which also provide role-based access control. Currently, the Redmine ITS has more than 13000 issues and the number of issues is increasing time to time being. The authors have analyzed the Redmine dataset and found that starvation also occurred for issues in Software Development. The authors believe that this finding will steer the Software Engineering community for conducting research on advanced prioritization techniques which will resolve Issue starvation. Furthermore, the authors have provided few future research directions where this dataset can be used.

Agile software development methods by focusing on the different values, have established a new approach for software development compare to the traditional methods. While traditional methods emphasizes on the following disciplined processes and rigid practices, agile methods focused on individuals and their collaborations. Previously, CMMI was introduced as process improvement model in the traditional methods and now it is known as symbol of those methods. Nevertheless, compatibility of these two different approaches has been a serious question and there are several conflicting reports about their compatibility. The main purpose of this study was scrutinizing this issue. Generic practices and specific practices in CMMI were selected as criteria for checking compatibility of CMMI and agile methods. The results showed that CMMI and agile are compatible in several process areas. However, there are serious incompatibilities in the others. In level 3 and level 4 of CMMI, two and one incompatible process areas have been seen respectively. Also, agile does not support most of the generic practices in CMMI level 4 and 5. The results also showed that these incompatibilities return to the notion of organization and its role in software development.

Some projects are simply too big to finish on the release schedule that you want to maintain. Rally's agile engineering team delivered a very disruptive architectural change lasting nine months in parallel with three releases. This paper will show how this was done without prolonging the usual release cycles and without technically crippling our product or doing a lot of throwaway work. The main elements of our approach were: the "Sacrifice One" pattern, incremental delivery of the architectural change when possible, technical infrastructure modifications to support incremental changes to the architecture, and addressing the biggest risk first. When we were close to finished, we added the whole team for the final push to release with the new architecture. The end result was three successful releases of the existing system prior to the final release rolling out the new architecture.