Agile Methods

Based on my experience in as a professional software developer, I have long been interested in software development methods. This was the focus of my PhD and an early working paper on the limitations of plan-driven/waterfall methods was written in 1993, with a conference paper  (Fitzgerald 1994) and a subsequent journal paper  (Fitzgerald 1996).

This research has been conducted in the following streams:

• Method-in-action – studies of software development method usage in practice (Fitzgerald 1997; Fitzgerald 1998a; Fitzgerald 1998b; Fitzgerald et al 2002)

• Agile Methods including the ‘a la carte’ tailoring of agile methods at Intel, (Fitzgerald et al 2006)

• Method tailoring – of agile methods in general (Conboy & Fitzgerald 2010), multi-level method tailoring at Motorola (Fitzgerald et al 2003) and for web development (Lang & Fitzgerald 2005) and model-driven development (Mattsson et al 2009)

• Agile methods in regulated environments – the final frontier for agile methods which were initially proposed as being suited to (1) snall project for (2) co-located teams in (3) non-critical environments. A paper at the ICSE SEIP track, Fitzgerald et al (2013) presents a case study of R-Scrum (Regulated Scrum), a term we coined to describe the tailoring of Scrum to meet the needs of a regulated environment. Other terms coined in this study include Continuous Compliance and Living Traceability.

References

Conboy, K and Fitzgerald, B (2010) Method and developer characteristics for effective agile method tailoring: a study of expert opinion, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology (TOSEM), Vol. 20, No 1, June 2010

Fitzgerald, B. (1994) The Systems Development Dilemma: Whether to Adopt Formalised Systems Development Methodologies or Not?, in Baets, W. (Ed) Proceedings of Second European Conference on Information Systems, Nijenrode University Press, Holland, pp. 691-706 

Fitzgerald, B. (1996) Formalised Systems Development Methodologies: A Critical Perspective, The Information Systems Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 3-23 

Fitzgerald, B. (1997) The Use of Systems Development Methodologies in Practice: A Field Study, The Information Systems Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 201-212.

Fitzgerald, B. (1998a) An Empirically-Grounded Framework for the IS Development Process, in Hirschheim, R., Newman, M. and deGross, J. (Eds) Proceedings of the 19^th Annual International Conference on Information Systems, (ICIS1998), Helsinki, December, 1998, pp. 103-114

Fitzgerald, B. (1998b) An Empirical Investigation into the Adoption of Systems Development Methodologies, Information & Management, Vol. 34, pp. 317-328

Fitzgerald, B, Hartnett, G and Conboy, K (2006) Customising agile methods to software practices at Intel Shannon, European Journal of Information Systems, Vol 15, No 2, pp. 197-210

Fitzgerald, B., Russo, N. and O’Kane, T. (2003) Software Development Method Tailoring at Motorola, Communications of the ACM, Apr 2003, Vol. 46, No. 4, pp. 64-70.

Fitzgerald, B., Russo, N. and Stolterman, E. (2002) Information Systems Development: Method-in-Action, McGraw Hill, UK

 Fitzgerald B, Stol, KJ, O’Sullivan R and O’Brien D (2013) Scaling Agile Methods to Regulated Environments:  An Industry Case Study, Proceedings of 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), IEEE Publications, San Francisco, USA, pp. 863-872. 

Lang, M and Fitzgerald, B (2005) Hypermedia systems development practice: a survey, IEEE Software, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 68-75

Matsson, A, Lundell, B, Lings, B and Fitzgerald, B (2009), Linking model driven development and software architecture: A case study, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol 35 No 1 pp83-93