Automatic Status Updates in Exacts Global Development Process

Title

Automatic Status Updates in Exacts Global Development Process

 Author

Valkema, M.

Contributor

Hurkmans, T. (mentor)
Van Solingen, D.M. (mentor)
Van Deursen, A. (mentor)

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

 Department

Software Engineering

 Date

2009-12-17

 Abstract

Due to a competitive business environment and demanding customers, many companies turn to globally distributed software development and agile methodologies. Globally distributed software engineering can bring great advantages in reducing costs, reducing time to market, and give access to a larger pool of skilled resources. Agile methodologies acknowledge many of the development challenges companies face, such as changing customers requirements and the necessity to have frequent releases. Introducing agile by itself can be a challenge for a big organization, especially when a blend is made between agile and distributed development, since these have some contradictory features. The global company Exact faces some challenges when introducing agility into its business processes. This research has as a goal to introduce agile into the globally distributed development process of Exact. It is hard to introduce agile as a whole, therefore we address the biggest challenges faced within Exacts development process first. One of the main challenges faced within Exact is communication between the globally dispersed product management and product development teams. An agile practice addressing this communication challenge is to use automatic status updates and product updates generated by an automated build process. This research will explore what features of continuous integration are useful for Exact and the created system will be evaluated. The ideas presented in this thesis have not yet been tested and evaluated on a large scale, due to time restrictions. However a prototype has been tested on a small scale for one project, and the initial responses from product development and product management were positive. More important, a shift in perception occurred at product development to support a more open development process.

 Subject

globally distributed software engineering

 To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ed6736b9-3284-4f45-bf29-b345afd4be04

 Embargo date

2010-01-08

 Part of collection

Student theses

 Document type

master thesis

 Rights

(c) 2009 Valkema, M.
Files
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