The ABCSoftware companyhas been in the market place for over20 years. While some of the development team
Question:
The ABCSoftware companyhas been in the market place for over20 years. While some of the development team members have changed over time, there was a firmly established culture using the Waterfall method. The typical process involved setting product requirements up front, some generated directly from customers and others determined by employees (developers and product managers, for example) who attempted to gauge the customer's needs indirectly. Once requirements were determined, specification documents would be written with varying details of the intended functionalities. The specification documents would contain time estimates for completion, and it was common to have a team working on several features simultaneously, with some features requiring many weeks of development time. Developers would proceed to coding the requirements and once complete would hand the software developed to the test team. Testing effort would involve unit testing the features using the "black Box" method. The last part of the development process usually between 3 and 4 months would be dedicated to final pass testing, including a regression testing phase.
Over time, the code base and complexity of the underlying code grew significantly. From the initial version of the product consisting of 5,000,000 lines of code, the size of the code has grown to over 22,000,000 lines of codes for the current release. The dedicated maintenance development team grew from 10 dedicated people in 1997 to 70 in 2014. The code base also quadrupled during the same period, from 5 million lines of code to over 20 millions. While the relationship appears to be linear, the number of additional people working on maintenance was actually higher than 40 people dedicated for maintenance. On average, it was common to have developers spending 15% of their time working on maintenance related issues. The increase in people maintaining the existing codes contributes to the complexity of the codes over time.
The average time to market for each major release was around 1.5 years, comparable to that of its competitors. Overall product quality wasfair andthere was concern that the organisation was not responsive enough to customers' needs.
Q1 Imagine that youwork asan Agileconsultant andadvise the managers ofthe companythat they should transit from Waterfall to Agile Methodology. Describe and justify one mainreason for your recommendation for them to have this transition, giventhecurrent development environment and problems.
Q2 Describe and justify an obstacle to the transition from Waterfall to Agile that you perceive that the company would face.
Q3 Describe and justify a measure (or supportfrom the management team) that you would suggest the company to put in place to help facilitatethe transition.
International Marketing And Export Management
ISBN: 9781292016924
8th Edition
Authors: Gerald Albaum , Alexander Josiassen , Edwin Duerr