Most corporations are still fairly traditionally structured even though many software development teams are heading full steam into modern agile development techniques and exploring other new technologies such as MDA.
This leaves management stuck coping with an organizational and technical paradigm shift that traditional project management practices are inadequate to handle. In the highly iterative, fast paced, environment characteristic of these agile development projects, traditional approaches to budgeting, testing, quality assurance, requirements gathering, scheduling and estimating, etc. break down. Managers trying to encourage best practices as recommended by CMMI and SPICE find themselves at odds with developers trying to adopt best practices as recommended by the agile manifesto. In the end no one wins. Because of the constraints of corporate policies and management edicts, developers can’t fully adopt agile practices. Because the developers do adopt as much of the agile process as they can get away with, team leads find that traditional approaches to management don’t work.

Such projects must succeed in what is called a quasi agile development environment.

In my experience these quasi agile development environments characterize a large percentage of today’s significant software projects. Lack of explicit understanding of this reality, and failure to actively adapt to it, is causing significant problems in many software development organizations.

This tutorial explains practical ways to adapt the formal process control inherent in CMMI recommendations to the more flexible practices of agile development.

Unit 1 – Quasi-Agile Development (QAD)

• Agile manifesto
• Defining QAD
• Adapting Agile principles to QAD
• What Agile practices won’t work with QAD
• Why QAD characterizes so many of today’s significant software development projects

Unit 2 – How testing and quality assurance is affected by QAD

• Project organizational issues
• New skill set requirements for testers
• Additional skill set requirements for developers
• Testing models
• Testing “partially finished” artifacts
• Testing components
• Testing refactored code and regression testing
• Structured walkthroughs

Unit 3 – Reconciling formal process control and QAD

• ISO 900x
• CMMI
• Baseline reviews versus delta reviews

Unit 4 – A few baseline requirements for success using QAD

• Physical space requirements
• Software tools required
• Organization requirements
• Stakeholder requirements
• Other requirements

Unit 5 – How the fundamentals of managing are affected by QAD

• Planning and tracking
• Budgeting
• Hiring and personnel management
• Managing stakeholder expectations
• Quality assurance
• Overall project responsibility

Unit 6 – Conclusions

• Top 10 potential pitfalls
• Top 10 factors for success

Timothy Korson has had a decade of substantial experience working on a large variety of systems developed using modern software engineering techniques. This experience includes distributed, real time, embedded systems as well as business information systems in an n-tier, client-server environment.
Dr. Korson’s typical involvement on a project is as a senior management consultant with additional technical responsibilities to ensure high quality, robust test and quality assurance processes and practices. Dr. Korson has authored numerous articles, and co-authored a book on Object Technology Centers. He has given frequent invited lectures at major international conferences and has contributed to the discipline through original research. The lectures and training classes he presents are highly rated by the attendees.