Is Agile Essay Now Outdated Fashion?

Use the module materials and your own research to write a magazine article (such as you might find in a professional publication such as Computing, Computer Weekly or BCS’s IT Now) that critically discusses the issues around one of the following titles:

1. Discuss why it may be seen as an advantage to use business processes as a way to identify analysis classes and thus also the software classes in an object-oriented system. Identify and compare other ways of identifying software classes.
2. Examine the case for the waterfall life cycle.  Does the waterfall life cycle still play a useful role in modern systems development, and if so, at which stages?
3. If we consider UML as 'just a modelling language' then it should not matter which methodology or life-cycle we use it within.  But is this true?  Discuss whether or not UML should be used only when the project life-cycle is iterative and incremental.
4. Is the use of a software development methodology necessary only for inexperienced developers?   Should the experienced staff also follow a methodology?  Discuss.
5. Are Agile Methods now no more than a fashion that has become out-of-date?
6. What is the best way to identify software classes from use cases?
7. In what circumstances would it not be appropriate to follow an iterative and incremental path? Why?
8. Explain what it means to say that Object Oriented modelling is ‘seamless’ throughout the life-cycle? Discuss whether this claim is justified or exaggerated.
9. The reuse of software and models is said to help make systems development more economical.  Which aspects of Object Oriented development actually achieve this benefit in practice?
10. Patterns were first applied to OO program design, but over time patterns have been identified for analysis, project management, systems architecture and more.  What are UML Profiles, and what is their value to the modelling process?
11. Agile Methods such as XP emphasise code over documentation.  A potential criticism is that those who have to maintain such systems appear to have very little information to tell them what it does and why it was designed that way.  Does this make XP a good choice of methodology?
12. Would it make sense to have a life-cycle that was iterative but not incremental?  Or one that was incremental but not iterative?  Why is the RUP life-cycle both?
13. Just how important is UML to the success of OO software projects today?  Discuss.
14. Does the spread of mobile and distributed computer systems present new challenges for systems analysts or designers? Critically analyse and discuss.
15. Agile Methods like DSDM and SCRUM appear to take as much control as they can away from senior managers and put it in the hands of the project team.  Is this is really such a good idea? 
16. In an iterative life-cycle, the activities of documenting requirements, analysing requirements, design, implementation and so on are all seen as ‘disciplines’ or activities that run through all the phases of the project life-cycle.  Explain and assess the advantages of organising a project this way.
17. What is Model Driven Architecture™?  Does it deliver any real benefits to the clients of systems development organisations? Explain.
18. Use Cases are not inherently object-oriented.  Why then is use case modelling so important in the OO approach?  Discuss.
19. Object-oriented development methods generally follow an iterative life-cycle – is this really necessary, or could you have OO without iteration?
20. “New systems development increasingly relies on software components developed outside the client organisation.”  First, is this statement true, and second, what does it imply for the activities of analysis and design?
21. UML does not include any advice or guidance about the sequence of activities within the life-cycle - that is the concern of methodology. But why should the notation for analysis and design be completely independent of the methodology? Explore this aspect of systems development.

This article aims to discuss the topic “Are Agile Methods now no more than a fashion that has become out-of-date?". A brief discussion of an overview of agile methods is provided in this report. A brief discussion of the advantages and the disadvantages of agile methods is provided in this report. A discussion of the current popularity of agile methods is provided in this report.

The method of agile software development is the approach for development of software in which the solutions and the requirements grows with the connected effort of the teams that are cross-functional and are self-organising and the customers (Fitzgerald et al. 2013). This development method governs the evolutionary development, continual improvement, early delivery, and adaptive planning and it also encourages the response to change that is swift and flexible.

The method of agile software development is widely used in the present times. The popularity of the agile methods is due to the following advantages that are provided by the agile methods:

• Useful software is used for providing satisfaction to the customers by the delivery that is rapid and continuous
• Regular and constant interaction among the developers and the people of business
• Often, the delivery of working software is done
• Constant adaption to the changes in circumstances
• Regular detailing of the good design and technical excellence
• The communication that is done personally is the best kind of communication
• The changes in the requirements of the customers that appear significantly late is accepted and the changes are made

Some of the disadvantages of the agile methods are:

• Lacks in the importance of documentation and designing
• In the situations of any deliverables of software, specifically in the large ones, there is a difficulty in the assessment of the effort that is required in the beginning stage of the life cycle of software development
• The decision making capability resides in the possession of the senior programmers, which is essential in the development process of software (Gandomani et al. 2013). This eliminates the opportunities of the new programmers to learn new things without the use of experienced resources

The method of agile software development is done for software development where the solutions and the requirements grows. The agile methods is the most popular software development tool that is preferred over the other tools of software development (Campanelli and Parreiras 2015). The use of agile methods is still not outdated because the agile methods offers several opportunities for team engagement and the stakeholders-during, end and before of each phase of software development. With the involvement of the clients in all the steps of development process of software, it provides collaboration among the project team and the client that can be comprehensive. This collaboration among the team and the client provides an increase in the opportunities for the team in understanding the vision of the client (Dick et al. 2013). This method also provides a greater transparency among the project team and the clients. The importance of transparency in the projects is because this delivers the prioritisation of the features for the planning of iteration and the review of sessions for frequently building software that needs to contain new features. With the utilisation of the method of agile software development, the delivery of the new features is done frequently and quickly, with increased level of predictability. This method also offers the opportunity of releasing the software or perform a beta-testing of the software (Kaisti et al. 2013). The agile methods has a feature of allowing for changes in the projects. Even though the project team needs to deliver a project in the allocated time frame, sometimes there is a situation of regular refining and the reprioritisation of the backlog of the complete product. The planning of the new or the altered items of backlog can be done for next iteration, which leads to the chance of introducing changes in a few weeks (Grimheden 2013). In this method of software development, the primary focus is on the business value that means it allows the client to regulate the features priority and it increases the understanding of the team regarding the business of the client and it can help in delivering the features that offers the highest value of business (Dingsøyr and Moe 2013). The methods of agile generally uses the stories of the user with the acceptance criteria for defining the features of products that are focussed on the business. With the focus on the actual requirements of the real users, value is incrementally delivered by each feature and not just the component of IT. This also offers the opportunity of beta testing each software after every sprint, gaining the valuable feedback in early stages of the project and it provides the ability of making alterations whenever needed (Abrahamsson et al. 2017). The agile methods provides the opportunity of improving the quality of improving the quality of projects as these projects are segregated into manageable units that leads to the focussing on the high quality development, collaboration and testing.

Reflective part

The method of agile is a comprehensive tool to develop software and not only provide benefits to the team of development, but it also offers a number of crucial benefits of business to the client (Cervone 2014). This method helps the project teams in dealing with several common pitfalls of the project like cost, scope creep and the predictability of the schedule in increased controlled manner (Rodríguez et al. 2014). These are reason why the method of agile is most popular method of software development and it has not been outdated in the present times.

Conclusion

Therefore, it can be concluded that the agile method of software development is not outdated and it offers several benefits to the project teams and the clients. The method of agile software development is the approach for development of software in which the solutions and the requirements grows with the connected effort of the teams that are cross-functional and are self-organising and the customers. The agile methods is the most popular software development tool that is preferred over the other tools of software development. The use of agile methods is still not outdated because the agile methods offers several opportunities for team engagement and the stakeholders-during, end and before of each phase of software development. In this method of software development, the primary focus is on the business value that means it allows the client to regulate the features priority and it increases the understanding of the team regarding the business of the client and it can help in delivering the features that offers the highest value of business.

I provided this article to one of my friend for obtaining a feedback. According to the first feedback, I improved the introduction which was lacking some clarity regarding the structure of the paper. Another student provided me feedback regarding the discussion part where I needed to make some changes in that part and include more in texting and also some examples from to make it look more appealing. A student offered me an advice of making the article more directed towards the topic and create the opportunity of making the readers understand the full concept of the topic and make real impact. I made some changes in the presentation style of the document by adding bullet points for attracting the attention of the readers to the crucial points and help the readers understand the message that I wanted to present from this article. In the introduction part, I had made only one paragraph to describe the structure of the article and introduce the topic. But after the feedback from a student of my class, I made some changes in the introduction part and made the whole section in two parts. The first part consists of the structure of the article which I have tried to present here and the second paragraph presents an idea about the topic that provides a general idea about the main points that are to be discussed in this article. One of the classmates provide me the feedback of improving the conclusion part and provide the closing statement of the article with more gravity and weight.

Reference

Abrahamsson, P., Salo, O., Ronkainen, J. and Warsta, J., 2017. Agile software development methods: Review and analysis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.08439.

Campanelli, A.S. and Parreiras, F.S., 2015. Agile methods tailoring–A systematic literature review. Journal of Systems and Software, 110, pp.85-100.

Cervone, H.F., 2014. Improving strategic planning by adapting agile methods to the planning process. Journal of Library Administration, 54(2), pp.155-168.

Dick, M., Drangmeister, J., Kern, E. and Naumann, S., 2013, May. Green software engineering with agile methods. In Green and Sustainable Software (GREENS), 2013 2nd International Workshop on (pp. 78-85). IEEE.

Dingsøyr, T. and Moe, N.B., 2013. Research challenges in large-scale agile software development. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 38(5), pp.38-39.

Fitzgerald, B., Stol, K.J., O'Sullivan, R. and O'Brien, D., 2013, May. Scaling agile methods to regulated environments: An industry case study. In Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 863-872). IEEE Press.

Gandomani, T.J., Zulzalil, H., Ghani, A.A.A., Sultan, A.B.M. and Nafchi, M.Z., 2013. Obstacles in moving to agile software development methods; at a glance. Journal of Computer Science, 9(5), p.620.

Grimheden, M.E., 2013. Can agile methods enhance mechatronics design education?. Mechatronics, 23(8), pp.967-973.

Kaisti, M., Rantala, V., Mujunen, T., Hyrynsalmi, S., Könnölä, K., Mäkilä, T. and Lehtonen, T., 2013. Agile methods for embedded systems development-a literature review and a mapping study. EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems, 2013(1), p.15.

Rodríguez, P., Partanen, J., Kuvaja, P. and Oivo, M., 2014, January. Combining lean thinking and agile methods for software development: A case study of a finnish provider of wireless embedded systems detailed. In System Sciences (HICSS), 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 4770-4779). IEEE.