Agile Methodologies in Mission Critical Software Development and Maintenance

• Autor(a) principal: Maria Antonieta Dias Ponce de Leão e Oliveira
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/handle/10216/88416
• topic: Engenharia electrotécnica, electrónica e informática; Electrical engineering, Electronic engineering, Information engineering

Software development depends on people and because of this many issues arise specially regarding consistency and quality. Guaranteeing quality, accurate estimation, and highperformance knowledge workers is not an easy job, and for this there are many methodologies and processes that help.This is not a new issue; many software development companies, somewhere along their lifetime passed through this hassle, and with the study of their victories and defeats as well as worldwide recognized best practices, were able to improve their processes and performance.ALERT, is an example of a software development company that is continuously striving to improve, and their goal, at the moment is to increase quality, productivity and estimation accuracy.The goal of this project is to identify any exiting issues in the current software development processes and practices at the organization, propose a hybrid and customized proposal of agile and classical methodologies that will help to optimize the performance of the knowledge workers, never forgetting that the productivity of knowledge workers is deeply connected with their motivation.This project was developed in three main phases, diagnosis, proposal and implementation of the proposal in three pilot teams.With the information gathered from individual interviews and close observation, a diagnosis was created that represented the company status at that moment. Based on the diagnosis, the company's past experiences, and well known models, methodologies and processes the scope was defined - Scrum, Kanban, TSP and CMMI - and a proposal was created.The goals of the proposal were created in order to hopefully increase productivity, reduce defects and/or improve estimation accuracy, expediting the software development process. In the end it is presented an analysis of the subjective and objective results of the proposal's impact in the pilot teams. Nevertheless the main outputs of this dissertation are the diagnosis and the customized proposal, as the pilot's project success is highly dependent on the participating knowledge workers.