TITLE: Agile Software Development: Current Situation and Future Trends SPEAKER: Kerstin Siakas (Department of Informatics, Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki) ABSTRACT: Many new paradigms and methodologies have been developed aiming to find solutions to the persisting software crisis. The most eminent paradigm to make software development more predictable is Software Process Improvement (SPI), a worldwide movement, which accentuates a disciplined approach embracing repeatable processes and continuous improvements. The conviction in SPI is that a high-quality process will deliver high-quality products. The main criticism against SPI is that it creates a lot of bureaucracy and constrains innovation. Ever since agile software development was introduced in the mid-1990s, it has become a controversial software engineering topic with practitioners and researchers arguing about its benefits. The fundamental principles of Agile Methodologies, including exponents such as eXtreme Programming (XP), Scrum, or other project management and development methods associated with the -Y´Agile Development Movement¡, take account of an iterative and incremental software development process, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organising cross-functional teams and close collaboration with customers. Flexibility and quick response to changing requirements are considered a necessity to sustain and improve customers’ competitive advantage. Quality, security and productivity do not need to be compromised, despite the fast pace and lean concepts of Agile development. The strength of Agile methodologies lies in the enthusiastic highly skilled work-force (one of the requirements when creating an agile team) that save organisations significant amounts of development time and money, while delivering high-quality software. Also increased productivity has been reported by many organisations. Agile methodologies are considered to be suitable in collocated development environments for creating non safety-critical software. Concerns for security in terms of time and resources for testing application security defects have been improved by introducing different security activities to agile software development methodologies. Many companies have adapted, tailored and customised the agile approach to fit their own organisational practices. Simultaneously society has become increasingly connected and the interactions between people have amplified. It has gradually become obvious that the human factor plays an important role in sustaining organisations and in adding business value and competitive advantage. A trend towards the globalisation of business in general and of software-intensive sectors in particular has emerged. Access to world-class software professionals, improved quality and time-to-market to lower costs has triggered several companies to explore these new worldwide business relationships. As a result of these two main trends in today’s software development there is a huge interest in the possibilities to blend the two approaches. However, basically both rely on totally different philosophies and include many different challenges on their own. This presentation describes the main features of agile development and identifies success factors and challenges for agile software developments as well as distributed agile software development. The challenges are unfolded and best practices for distributed agile development are proposed. Kerstin Siakas biographical note -------------------------------- Kerstin Siakas is a full-time member of the academic staff at the Department of Informatics, ATEI of Thessaloniki since 1989 (currently Associate Professor). She holds a BSc and MSc in Economics from Handelshögskolan vid Åbo Academy, Finland and a PhD in Quality Management from the department of Computing at the London Metropolitan University, UK. She also has an extensive industrial experience in developing Information Systems on different levels (programmer, analyst, IT manager) from mainly global organisations in different countries. She is engaged in research in Information Systems Engineering, Multidisciplinary Approaches of Software Engineering, Knowledge Management and Software Quality Management. She has a particular interest in the social, cultural and political approaches and their effect on society, such as globalisation, outsourcing, eLearning and eInclusion, as well as on the subsequent challenges for managers, educators and governments. She has published around 100 scientific papers about her research in journals, book chapters and international refereed conferences. She has been very active in different EU sponsored lifelong learning and research programmes (see for example: http://valo.teithe.gr/, http://socialmedianetworker.eu/, http://sites.it.teithe.gr/dima, http://www.ittk.hu/netis/, http://www.it.yu.edu.jo/tempus/). Lately she spent 7 months at the Production department at University of Vaasa, Finland participating in the KEMO project. Her role in the project was the investigation of the cultural factors influencing organisations doing business in a global context (see http://www.uva.fi/materiaali/pdf/isbn_978-952-476-375-2.pdf for a full report of the study).