Mastering Agile Practice Adoption through a Model-Driven Approach for the Combination of Development Methods

Many software companies are adapting their traditional development processes to incorporate agile practices. In this context, it is necessary to count on expert knowledge to evaluate different agile practices and configure them according to project needs. However, this expert knowledge is scarce, difficult to validate, and time-consuming, since it is applied manually. As a solution, the paper presents a model-driven approach, called SIAM, which automatically generates guidelines for the adoption of agile practices through the combination of different development methods. SIAM is supported by a meta-model architecture to implement a knowledge repository that characterizes method configuration decisions, which can be reused in different development projects. SIAM has been implemented in a tool suite that facilitates the specification of models and the identification of issues during the definition of the development processes. The approach has been successfully applied to reconfigure an industrial development process with agile methods, showing that the effort required for tailoring agile practices according to organizational standards is considerably reduced.