Optimising agile development practices for the maintenance operation: nine heuristics

Abstract

Agile methods are widely used and successful in many development situations and beginning to attract attention amongst the software maintenance community -both researchers and practitioners. However, it should not be assumed that implementing a well-known agile method for a maintenance department is therefore a trivial endeavour -the maintenance operation differs in some, important respects from development work. Classical accounts of software maintenance emphasise more traditional software engineering processes, whereas recent research accounts of agile maintenance efforts uncritically focus on benefits. In an action research project at Aveva in Denmark we assisted with the optimisation of SCRUM, tailoring the standard process to the immediate needs of the developers. We draw on both theoretical and empirical learning to formulate seven heuristics for maintenance practitioners wishing to go agile.

SKI: A New Agile Framework that Supports DevOps, Continuous Delivery, and Lean Hypothesis Testing

“…Heeager and Rose [14] also explored how to enable maintenance within the Sprint framework. They conducted a study on agile maintenance and found major problems related to missed sprint goals due to the requested, but unplanned, emergency work during the sprints.…”

“…While buffers can be used to enable the use of Scrum in a DevOps/CD context, the practice of using a buffer can also be thought of as actually having two processes, one for the Ops (interrupt) work, and the other process for the development work [15]. This is why Heeager and Rose [14] suggested the creation of a well-managed mechanism to handle this buffer work. It has also been argued that the use of a buffer reduces project transparency [16].…”

“…Beyond the challenge relating to the fact that operational support tasks are difficult to predict (e.g., emergency bug fixes), similar to Mitchell [16], they note that these unplanned tasks often lack visibility across the team. In addition, it has also been argued that maintenance work differs from development work [14]. For example, maintenance work can be organized into sprints, but there is not necessarily any task synergy or common goal for these tasks [18].…”

“…Hence, there may be less need (or perceived need) for openness, information sharing and collective ownership if the tasks are unrelated, and there is no coherent release [19]. Therefore, it has been noted that it's reasonable to expect a number of challenges when using Scrum in a maintenance context [14,17].…”

Supporting the combination of agile manner and architecture based development method

“…Korhonen K's work indicates that in a large distributed organization using agile from the start may be not a good choice, and a guided SA is more valuable than coding client's story [3] . Lise Tordrup Heeager and Jeremy Rose claim that in the past decade some agile method had sprung out and were acceptable for development projects as it is lightweight and flexible, but research evidence for the success of these approaches still remains slim [4] . Particularly, Bjarnason E, et al argue that how to get requirements in accordance with agile method is important but unsolved [5] .…”