Agile development: issues and avenues requiring a substantial enhancement of the business perspective in large projects

  • Authors:
  • Oualid Ktata;Ghislain Lévesque

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Québec at Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada;University of Québec at Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada

  • Venue:
  • C3S2E '09 Proceedings of the 2nd Canadian Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Large-scale projects, are often delivering low value software to businesses due to stakeholders' misunderstanding. Evolutionary software development represents an alternative to plan-driven development in order to tackle today's turbulent environments. In agile development, a type of evolutionary development, the product owner (P.O.) who is the customer representative---real accountable role---is ill-equipped to identify and prioritize the stakeholders' most success-critical expectations and potential sources of business value. Furthermore, the tools he can use have their own scalability issues that question their underlying principles. Moreover, without a substantial involvement to take into account all stakeholders, software providers are more likely acting as commodity-utility providers than real business partners. In today's business context, there is a clear need for a value-driven development which embraces changes along with higher visibility and understanding of business transformations. The current problems of software crisis could be condensed in a twofold business perspective dilemma: Doing the right product and providing efficient guidance to the development project. Approaches based on goals have been successfully used in Requirements Engineering (RE) and IT governance to address issues similar to the current software crisis. Commonalities in motivations behind the use of goals in both domains can open new avenues for improving the business perspective in Scrum. A goal-value oriented approach is then proposed as a candidate approach to balance the stakeholders' needs and expectations for large-scale agile developments and ensure focus on delivering high value functionalities.