A study of enabling factors for rapid fielding combined practices to balance speed and stability

Abstract

Abstract-Agile projects are showing greater promise in rapid fielding as compared to waterfall projects. However, there is a lack of clarity regarding what really constitutes and contributes to success. We interviewed project teams with incremental development lifecycles, from five government and commercial organizations, to gain a better understanding of success and failure factors for rapid fielding on their projects. A key area we explored involves how Agile projects deal with the pressure to rapidly deliver high-value capability, while maintaining project speed (delivering functionality to the users quickly) and product stability (providing reliable and flexible product architecture). For example, due to schedule pressure we often see a pattern of high initial velocity for weeks or months, followed by a slowing of velocity due to stability issues. Business stakeholders find this to be disruptive as the rate of capability delivery slows while the team addresses stability problems. We found that experienced practitioners, when faced with these challenges, do not apply Agile practices alone. Instead they combine practices-Agile, architecture, or other-in creative ways to respond quickly to unanticipated stability problems. In this paper, we summarize the practices practitioners we interviewed from Agile projects found most valuable and provide an overarching scenario that provides insight into how and why these practices emerge.

Agile Big Data Analytics for Web-Based Systems: An Architecture-Centric Approach

“…Architecture design is "up-front" work, which appears to be contradictory to agility. Although we believe, and much research has shown, that architectural principles and agile practices are actually well aligned [6][8] [10], this position has not always been universally accepted.…”

Perspectives on refactoring planning and practice: an empirical study

“…Similarly, losing sight of the big picture is also on the list of the top six concerns with agile development (Begel and Nagappan 2007). Recently, Bellomo (Bellomo et al 2013) explored how agile projects deal with the pressure to rapidly deliver high-value capabilities and found that incorporating refactoring with other development practices can be useful in being able to respond quickly to unanticipated stability problems.…”

“…But mandating tight scheduling constraints, may put off or prevent major redesigns, thus also putting off or preventing the creation of a reliable, stable, product with the flexibility needed to respond to rapid market changes (Kataoka et al 2002;Bellomo et al 2013). All too often, when decision makers pursue quick responses to the market, needed refactoring is deferred, code quality is reduced, and the refactoring that is eventually needed becomes more difficult and costly (Elssamadisy and Schalliol 2002).…”

Continuous planning: an important aspect of agile and lean development

“…Bellomo et al (2013) state that both industries and governments have been increasingly adopting agile-based incremental software development practices due to their ability to improve speed. Furthermore, lean development has been proposed as away to achieve substantial cost savings and quality improvements (Radnor and Walley, 2008).…”