Migrating Agile Methods to Standardized Development Practice

M odern business organizations are emergent—they reside in a state of continual process change. Globalization, deregulation, increased competition, mergers and acquisitions, and the like all reveal organizations in transition, adapting to a continuously changing business environment. In this dynamic context, however, organizations must still project quality of product, service, and process to gain market presence and competitive edge. Significant organizational tension arises as the stability that underpins notions of quality control is overlaid on environments in flux. In software development, this tension is most obvious in the difference between standardized engineering approaches and more recent agile methods. Engineering approaches tend toward explicitly defined processes that can be standardized both within and across organizations. The significant industry investment in engineering approaches is evident in standards such as the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO 9000 series, the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM), and a number of industry-led initiatives such as the Object Management Group’s Unified Modeling Language and the Rational Unified Process (RUP) from Rational Software. However, the agile development movement has begun to question the philosophy behind engineering initiatives. Agile development emphasizes the human or crafted aspects of software development over the engineering aspects—individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. The “Industrial Context: AgCo Legacy Migration” sidebar introduces our work with a large international systems integrator, which we pseudonymously call “AgCo.” In this work, we found engineering and agile perspectives to be equally important to modern software development. We developed a framework approach to implementing agile values and principles in the context of AgCo’s organizational mandate for the consistent use of RUP and CMM.