Defect Analysis in Large Scale Agile Development: Quality in the Agile Factory Model
Bernard S. Doherty, Andrew Jelfs, Aveek Dasgupta, Patrick Holden · 2016
Summary form only given. Despite the widespread proliferation of agile practices, implementation often fails due to lack of adequate project management support, decreased motivation or fear of increased interaction. Consequently, few organizations effectively adopt agile processes with tailoring often required to integrate agile methodology. This presentation provides an overview of an innovative large-scale tailored implementation of agile development termed the Agile Factory Model (AFM), with the aim of highlighting defect issues of specific importance to organizations undertaking large scale agile development. Drawing upon a substantial internal repository of defects, this study profiles defect severity, cause and lifecycle. Our results indicate that during development and testing the majority of defects which occur in the AFM are of severity 3, with requirements defects making up only 0.7%. Acceptance, Integration and Performance (AIP) testing captures the largest quantity of defects at 26.14% whilst a further 17.28% show up in Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT), where FAT and AIP are sequential stages in the AFM respectively. The results demonstrate that agile practices can be effectively translated to a globally distributed development environment.