Distributed agile software development

Distributed Agile Software Development Distribution of software development has in the recent past increasingly become common with the main aim being to save the costs of production and a reduction of the time to market. There are numerous issues which have led to emergence of weak communication thus affecting project adversity (Torgeir, Sridhar, Venu and Nils 2012, p. 1213-1221). These include large geographical distance differences in culture and the different time zones. Additionally, the use of agile practices for distributed development is increasingly gaining momentum in various organizations with the desire for increased quality and performance of the project. Agile principles have been proposed as the best solution for the numerous communication challenges related to Distributed software development.
Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies that aim to achieve a more nimble and lighter development processed which as a result make them increasingly responsive to change. We can alternatively term agile software development as a group of methods of software development based on both iterative and incremental developments. Additionally, their resolutions and requirements change through a partnership between cross-functional and self-organizing teams (Torgeir, Sridhar, Venu and Nils 2012, p. 1213-1221).
Torgeir, Sridhar, Venu and Nils (2012, p. 1213-1221) states that the agile software methodologies are anchored on various principles. The first is to develop software that meet customer requirements. The other principles are accepting any changes that might arise in requirements at any development stage, ensuring there is maintenance of the existing cooperation between the developers and the customers on a daily basis during the project development cycle and lastly being to develop on a test-driven basis which implies writing a test prior to writing a code (Torgeir, Sridhar, Venu and Nils 2012, p. 1213-1221). We can term agility to refer to do away with most of the heaviness in a bid to promoting reception of quick response towards changing environments, the changes in the requirements of the users and accelerating the project deadlines.
Distributed agile development processes have been applied with success to many projects. Agile distributed development process has been successfully applied on a project involving a developer’s team distributed in the academic workspace. We also have the DART project which was a research project on different web applications with one of the main goals being to analyze the ways in which Agile methodologies fit the numerous needs of web development (Torgeir, Sridhar, Venu and Nils 2012, p. 1213-1221). Lastly, there has been a case study showing the implementation of an agile methodology most specifically the Scrum to a research project. From this, we are justified to assert that the application of an agile and adaptive methodology is indeed justifiable because of the numerous successful research projects which are not only complex, but also very unstable processes that need to be continuously adapted along their way.
The use of agile methods with distributed software development has had numerous benefits in term of enhanced quality of software. It has helped in evaluation and progress measuring of project progress with most problems of the project being easily noticed at early stages. Additionally, it is able to handle the various problems that are related to communication challenges in global software development like difficulties experienced in initiation and maintenance of communication (Torgeir, Sridhar, Venu and Nils 2012, p. 1213-1221). Thus we can conclude that conscious use of modified agile technique is extremely helpful in overcoming the numerous challenges that have been facing distributed software development. Consequently, the combination of agile and distributed development can give benefits to the software industry exemplified in terms the increase in the production of high quality software through optimization of resources.
References
Torgeir, D, Sridhar, N, Venu, G, Nils, B 2012. A decade of agile methodologies: Towards explaining agile software development Journal of Systems and Software, 85, (6), pp. 1213-1221