One of the myths of Agile Development is that selforganizing teams do not need direction. The agile development movement focuses primarily on programmers – programmers should do X, Y and Z, and everyone else should do whatever it takes to support the programmers. A fantastic start, since programmers are the people who actually build the organization’s product; however, few techniques are offere...

While seemingly incompatible, combining global software development and agile practices is a challenge undertaken by many companies. Case study reports on the successful use of agile practices in small distributed projects already exist. How these practices can be applied to larger projects, however, remains unstudied. This paper reports a case study on agile practices in a 40person development...

In this talk we will describe a type of metaheuristics inspired by natural selection, which is generically named evolutionary algorithms. We will begin by providing a historic perspective of the evolutionary algorithms, and will emphasize the origins of the three most representative paradigms of this area: evolution strategies, evolutionary programming and genetic algorithms. Then, we will pres...

Scrum is one of the agile methods gaining more relevance among academics and practitioners. It is mainly applied in the context of software development, which is a knowledge-intensive activity and depends on learning to evolve. Therefore, it becomes crucial to understand the question: Does Scrum implementation trigger a process of Organizational Learning? If ‘Yes’, how does the OL occur? This r...

Software industry is increasingly using Agile Methods due to its benefits. However the way industry practices agile methods is some time divergent to the basic Agile Principles. For example customer involvement in the entire software development process is considered essential; but under certain conditions this requirement is not so critical. We have studied in detail such an adaptation by a la...

In this increasingly hypercompetitive environment, agile IT adoption practices constitute the foundation that drives the speed and extent of the adoption of appropriate IT systems especially in times of urgency. These practices are a priori conditions that enable enterprise agility that is becoming an imperative competitive requirement for firm’s survival. The main contribution of this study is...

Organizations are permanently confronted with the need for adaptation to a complex business environment that is in a continuous change and transformation. Thus, the organization’s agility represents a key element in obtaining the strategic advantage and the market success. The paper analyzes the connection between the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), the Business Process Management (BPM) an...

I n recent years, the use of, interest in, and controversies surrounding agile methods have all increased dramatically—as has anecdotal evidence for agile methods’ effectiveness in certain environments and for specific project types. Exactly in which environments and under what conditions agile methods work remains unclear, however. A development team at Motorola, for example, noted that, “a pl...

Agile software development (ASD) methods attempt to foster agility as one dimension of the complex activity of delivering software solutions to gain business advantage in turbulent environments. It is however unknown whether such methods improve code delivery in software houses producing legacy mainframe software where the source code is not in an object-oriented programming language. In this p...

The LSO Workshop series has focused on technical, organizational, and social solutions to problems of learning from past experiences and codifying the resulting best practices so they can be systematically used in subsequent software development efforts. The theme of the Fourth Workshop on Learning Software Organizations (LSO), held in Chicago, Illinois in August of 2002 was "Balancing Agile Pr...