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The process of engineering of software is one that requires a lot of knowledge and includes the process of gathering, designing, actual development, testing for functionality, use and maintenance. It is rear to find a team which constitutes of members who have all the required knowledge to meet the requirements set for the process to be successful. Because of this fact, it is important to share information and knowledge among the team members. This would ensure that the software organization would efficiently share expertise on the domain between the team that is involved in the software development and their customer.
Knowledge sharing would also bring together the ideas of the several members and form a unit of acquired knowledge that would be helpful in the running of the organization. Through sharing of knowledge, ideas that would have gotten lost due to loss of staff that is less experienced, will be captured and retained in the organization. Other traditional methods assist in the sharing of knowledge through the use of documentation. With these traditional methods, allocation of work provides for the specifics of what is to be accomplished, how it would be done and how much time it would take for the project to be done. This perspective shifts from recognizing the abilities of the individuals and to the process of creation. On the other hand, agile methods recognize and emphasize more on the creative abilities of the individuals and less on the process itself. Agile methods are, therefore, plan-driven.
Details
Description
Agile domain methods are methods in the software development process that separate tasks into small increases with little planning. Iterations, which last for between one and four weeks, involve a team of empowered individuals working together to see to it that the full cycle of the software development process is completed. This process runs from the planning stage through to the point that it has been tested and accepted by the relevant stakeholders (Ronkainen and Abrahamsson 23).
Team members comprise of a group of self-organizing people who do not regard themselves in terms of their corporate roles or positions. They all regard themselves as equals and all take responsibility and an initiative to meet the requirements in the iteration. They prefer to work in the same office which allows for face to face communication since they prefer this kind of communication to written documents. An agile team normally comprise of about five to nine people. The teams are made up of such a small number of people in order to make team collaborate and communication simple. When a large development effort is required, several teams can work together towards the same goal. Communication among the different teams may be facilitated through the use of videoconferencing or other effective ways (Ronkainen and Abrahamsson 24).
Each agile team has one member who acts as the customer representative. This member represents the community that is supposed to buy the product (software). He is usually appointed by the stakeholders to represent them and be available for developers to get answers to some problem domain questions during the process of software engineering.
Major Stakeholders
There are many project stakeholders who include any person who directly or indirectly uses the software, the senior management team, operation staff team and the actual owners who paid for the project (Ambler and Jeffries 12). Other stakeholders include developers of other systems that are integrated with the main software. Stakeholders may include other software or hardware teams. Production teams also have a stake on this. The maintenance professionals, who are likely to be affected by the development and functioning of the project, are also stakeholders.
There is a wide range of persons who may be affected by the new system. Their requirements must, therefore, be met appropriately. This is the reason why software development is not an easy task; each stakeholder has their own requirements and anticipations. It is important to work with stakeholders in order to identify what they want, develop it and then get their feedback. This feedback will help in getting solutions which reflect the needs of the stakeholders.
Benefits
The use of cross-functional teams is beneficial when using agile methods as it encourages better knowledge transfer. This is because they are used when there seems to be a lot of uncertainty and there is lacking knowledge about the domain and the requirements of the system. Another benefit of the agile methods is that it encourages continuous learning. This may be seen in the presence of reflection workshops and other meetings. Retrospectives in agile methods aid in the coming up of success factors and understanding them and also understanding the barriers of the development and management process. In the event of a team member facing difficulty, retrospectives give an opportunity for such issues to be raised. Since most agile executions use a commonplace task and face to face communication among members, this exposes problems and gives them a better position it handling them.
Challenges
Retrospectives only support learning among the teams. In conjunction with other agile processes, they do not show support for learning within the team (inter-team) in that organization. Another challenge is that many people believe that agile does not scale well and this explains why most software projects are still being engineered using the traditional waterfall method.
Works Cited
Ambler, Scott, and Ron Jeffries. Active Stakeholder Participation: An Agile Best Practice. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002. Print.
Ronkainen, Jane, and Paul Abrahamsson. Software development under stringent hardware constraints: Do agile methods have a chance? Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003. Print.
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