Agile Methods
Based on my experience in as a professional software developer, I have long been interested in software development methods. This was the focus of my PhD and an early working paper on the limitations of plan-driven/waterfall methods was written in 1993, with a conference paper (Fitzgerald 1994) and a subsequent journal paper (Fitzgerald 1996).
This research has been conducted in the following streams:
- Method-in-action – studies of software development method usage in practice (Fitzgerald 1997; Fitzgerald 1998a; Fitzgerald 1998b; Fitzgerald et al 2002)
- Agile Methods including the ‘a la carte’ tailoring of agile methods at Intel, (Fitzgerald et al 2006)
- Method tailoring – of agile methods in general (Conboy & Fitzgerald 2010), multi-level method tailoring at Motorola (Fitzgerald et al 2003) and for web development (Lang & Fitzgerald 2005) and model-driven development (Mattsson et al 2009)
- Agile methods in regulated environments – the final frontier for agile methods which were initially proposed as being suited to (1) snall project for (2) co-located teams in (3) non-critical environments. A paper at the ICSE SEIP track, Fitzgerald et al (2013) presents a case study of R-Scrum (Regulated Scrum), a term we coined to describe the tailoring of Scrum to meet the needs of a regulated environment. Other terms coined in this study include Continuous Compliance and Living Traceability.
References
Conboy, K and Fitzgerald, B (2010) Method and developer characteristics for effective agile method tailoring: a study of expert opinion, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology (TOSEM), Vol. 20, No 1, June 2010
Fitzgerald, B. (1994) The Systems Development Dilemma: Whether to Adopt Formalised Systems Development Methodologies or Not?, in Baets, W. (Ed) Proceedings of Second European Conference on Information Systems, Nijenrode University Press, Holland, pp. 691-706
Fitzgerald, B. (1996) Formalised Systems Development Methodologies: A Critical Perspective, The Information Systems Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 3-23
Fitzgerald, B. (1997) The Use of Systems Development Methodologies in Practice: A Field Study, The Information Systems Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 201-212.
Fitzgerald, B. (1998a) An Empirically-Grounded Framework for the IS Development Process, in Hirschheim, R., Newman, M. and deGross, J. (Eds) Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Information Systems, (ICIS1998), Helsinki, December, 1998, pp. 103-114
Fitzgerald, B. (1998b) An Empirical Investigation into the Adoption of Systems Development Methodologies, Information & Management, Vol. 34, pp. 317-328
Fitzgerald, B, Hartnett, G and Conboy, K (2006) Customising agile methods to software practices at Intel Shannon, European Journal of Information Systems, Vol 15, No 2, pp. 197-210
Fitzgerald, B., Russo, N. and O’Kane, T. (2003) Software Development Method Tailoring at Motorola, Communications of the ACM, Apr 2003, Vol. 46, No. 4, pp. 64-70.
Fitzgerald, B., Russo, N. and Stolterman, E. (2002) Information Systems Development: Method-in-Action, McGraw Hill, UK
Fitzgerald B, Stol, KJ, O’Sullivan R and O’Brien D (2013) Scaling Agile Methods to Regulated Environments: An Industry Case Study, Proceedings of 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), IEEE Publications, San Francisco, USA, pp. 863-872.
Lang, M and Fitzgerald, B (2005) Hypermedia systems development practice: a survey, IEEE Software, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 68-75
Matsson, A, Lundell, B, Lings, B and Fitzgerald, B (2009), Linking model driven development and software architecture: A case study, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol 35 No 1 pp83-93