| dc.description.abstract | In this rapidly changing world, companies must respond quickly to customer changes in order to remain competitive. Appropriate software development methodology must be chosen to ensure efficiency, flexibility and rapid response to customer needs. The traditional waterfall development methodology calls for comprehensive and clear definitions of the functional requirements in the planning stage, well before system designs and coding. Requirement changes are thus difficult to entertain. The Agile model, on the contrary, emphasizes that the development team needs to work closely with the actual business process experts and users. Functions are defined in a rolling fashion, where prototypes are implemented rapidly and acts a tool for communication. This requires high level of flexibilities and frequent updates.
Company A is a multinational corporation. Scope of software projects often includes multiple countries, such as, United States, Singapore, Mainland China, Malaysia, Taiwan and India. In addition to these internal members, project teams often include external members from outsourced software consulting companies and contractors. To cope with these difficulties, it decided to switch from the waterfall model to Agile, starting from a recent project, hoping that the new method would enable the project to be executed in response to rapid changes in system requirements. As expected, all sorts of problems were encountered during the development process, which is still on going.
This study attempts to look into the problems, and aims at gaining some insights into the introduction of the Agile method. These include issues from various aspects, including organizational behavior changes, project scope and resource issues, and communication problems arising from cultural differences among members. Suggestions are also proposed for Company A to improve its application of the agile method. | en_US |