people and project management issues rather than technical issues.4 Agile methods (see the related sidebar on page 22) are a recent set of development techniques that apply a human-centered approach to software production.5 The agile approach aims to deliver high-quality products faster, producing satisfied customers. We conducted an empirical study to investigate whether agile methods change a...

Agile practitioners pride themselves on highly productive, responsive, low ceremony, lightweight, tacit knowledge processes with little waste, adaptive planning and frequent iterative delivery of value. It is often assumed that CMMI compliant processes need to be heavyweight, bureaucratic, slow moving, high ceremony and plan driven. Agile developers often skeptically perceive formal process imp...

Agile software development methods have caught the attention of software practitioners and researchers worldwide. Several issues have arisen from the experience of software methodologies, including the nature of research questions that such studies address the advantages and challenges associated with being a member of the community under study, and how to maintain the rigour in data collection...

The software development process is becoming more complex everyday and thus requires specific tools that facilitate its management. In this article, Zentipede, a tool for managing the software development process in software factories, is presented. This tool simplifies the software process management and provides a lot of statistical data to help measure and improve the quality of developments...

Knowledge management is “a method that simplifies the process of sharing, distributing, creating, capturing and understanding the company knowledge.” Knowledge itself “is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information and expert insight that provide a framework for evaluation and incorporating new experience and new information.” Furthermore, “knowledge passes through differen...

Agile software development methodologies have been receiving a lot of attention in recent times. Although doubts have been cast on the efficacy of these methods for very large projects, some of the techniques and practices they advocate are very appealing and are being seriously considered by many organizations. It is our contention that many of these practices are antithetical to the orthodoxy...

The multi-agent systems paradigm represents one of the most promising approaches to the development of agile scheduling systems in manufacturing. Innovative and balanced perspectives of multi-agent approaches to agile scheduling are discussed in this paper, and several achieved results and current developments are described. The description of the multi-agent framework emphasizes the use of neg...

Cloud computing is an innovative and promising paradigm that is leading to remarkable changes in the way we manage our business. Cloud computing can provide scalable IT infrastructure, QoS-assured services and customizable computing environment. Such scalable and agile environment increases the call for agile and dynamic deployment and governance environments over multi-cloud infrastructure. Un...

Engineering organisations following a traditional development process often suffer from under-specified requirements and from poor responsiveness to changes in those requirements during the course of a project. Furthermore, these organizations need to deliver highly dependable products and decrease time-tomarket. In the software engineering community, Agile methods have been proposed to address...

Agile software system development approaches have become popular since the late 1990s. Agile method has been increasingly adopted by big players in software industry such as IBM, Microsoft, Nokia and Philips with a view to improving quality and productivity. Such quality improvement goals must be measured during system development to validate the approach, and there is a need for more qualitati...