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Back to the future: origins and directions of the “Agile Manifesto” – views of the originators
(2018)
In 2001, seventeen professionals set up the manifesto for agile software development. They wanted to define values and basic principles for better software development. On top of brought into focus, the manifesto has been widely adopted by developers, in software-developing organizations and outside the world of IT. Agile principles and their implementation in practice have paved the way for radical new and innovative ways of software and product development. In parallel, the understanding of the manifesto’s underlying principles evolved over time. This, in turn, may affect current and future applications of agile principles. This article presents results from a survey and an interview study in collaboration with the original contributors of the manifesto for agile software development. Furthermore, it comprises the results from a workshop with one of the original authors. This publication focuses on the origins of the manifesto, the contributors’ views from today’s perspective, and their outlook on future directions. We evaluated 11 responses from the survey and 14 interviews to understand the viewpoint of the contributors. They emphasize that agile methods need to be carefully selected and agile should not be seen as a silver bullet. They underline the importance of considering the variety of different practices and methods that had an influence on the manifesto. Furthermore, they mention that people should question their current understanding of "agile" and recommend reconsidering the core ideas of the manifesto.
Context: The current transformation of automotive development towards innovation, permanent learning and adapting to changes are directing various foci on the integration of agile methods. Although, there have been efforts to apply agile methods in the automotive domain for many years, a wide-spread adoption has not yet taken place.
Goal: This study aims to gain a better understanding of the forces that prevent the adoption of agile methods.
Method: Survey based on 16 semi-structured interviews from the automotive domain. The results are analyzed by means of thematic coding.
Results: Forces that prevent agile adoption are mainly of organizational, technical and social nature and address inertia, anxiety and context factors. Key challenges in agile adoption are related to transforming organizational structures and culture, achieving faster software release cycles without loss of quality, the importance of software reuse in combination with agile practices, appropriate quality assurance measures, and the collaboration with suppliers and other disciplines such as mechanics.
Conclusion: Significant challenges are imposed by specific characteristics of the automotive domain such as high quality requirements and many interfaces to surrounding rigid and inflexible processes. Several means are identified that promise to overcome these challenges.
Context: The current situation and future scenarios of the automotive domain require a new strategy to develop high quality software in a fast pace. In the automotive domain, it is assumed that a combination of agile development practices and software product lines is beneficial, in order to be capable to handle high frequency of improvements. This assumption is based on the understanding that agile methods introduce more flexibility in short development intervals. Software product lines help to manage the high amount of variants and to improve quality by reuse of software for long term development.
Goal: This study derives a better understanding of the expected benefits for a combination. Furthermore, it identifies the automotive specific challenges that prevent the adoption of agile methods within the software product line.
Method: Survey based on 16 semi structured interviews from the automotive domain, an internal workshop with 40 participants and a discussion round on ESE congress 2016. The results are analyzed by means of thematic coding.
Context: Software product lines are widely used in automotive embedded software development. This software paradigm improves the quality of software variants by reuse. The combination of agile software development practices with software product lines promises a faster delivery of high quality software. However, the set up of an agile software product line is still challenging, especially in the automotive domain. Goal: This publication aims to evaluate to what extend agility fits to automotive product line engineering. Method: Based on previous work and two workshops, agility is mapped to software product line concerns. Results: This publication presents important principles of software product lines, and examines how agile approaches fit to those principles. Additionally, the principles are related to one of the four major concerns of software product line engineering: Business, Architecture, Process, and Organization. Conclusion: Agile software product line engineering is promising and can add value to existing development approaches. The identified commonalities and hindering factors need to be considered when defining a combined agile product line engineering approach.