A FRAMEWORK FORANALYZING AGILE SOFTWARE METHODOLOGIES

摘要

The proponents of Agility in software methodologiesrntake the position that the heavyweight, high control,rnprocess, and document oriented methodologies are notrnadaptable and hence not suited for the information agerneconomy. They claim the Agile Methodologies arernadaptive and hence should be designed and configured tornthe needs of individual projects. In this paper we premisernthat software development is inherently a team basedrnactivity. Therefore, the design of methodologies canrnbenefit from research into group behavior and use ofrntechnology for enhancing team effectiveness. In this paperrnwe present a framework that permits an analysis of Agilernmethodologies in ways that can be valuable in adapting orrndesigning the methodologies to the needs of the individualrnsoftware teams. We review the Agile Community’srnperspective on what methodology is or what it should be.rnWe then present the group behaviorists’ view ofrnmethodology as an effectiveness enhancing interventionrninto the inputs, processes, and outputs of software teams.rnThe lesson we bring to light from this stream of researchrnis that the key to designing project specific softwarernmethodologies is to identify those aspects of softwarernmethodologies that can influence the team behavior andrnhence improve the effectiveness of teams’ interaction andrnsoftware development activities. Building on the earlierrnresearch (Hackman, et al, 1978 & Rana, et al, 1997), wernpresent a framework that identifies a set of featurerncategories in Agile methodologies and relates them to therneffectiveness controlling behaviors in software teams.