A Study Of Software Engineering Practices for Micro Teams
Shweta Deshpande · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 2011
For decades, software development has faced big problems -projects running over budget, over time, becoming unmanageable in terms of sheer size, software being inefficient, of low quality, and not fully meeting requirements.As a solution to these problems, various software engineering practices gradually developed and were practised by the developers and project managers.Over the decades, a number of standard methodologies came up and became widely used in the industry.These methodologies (waterfall model, spiral model, agile methodologies, Rational Unified Process, etc) proved to be fairly useful for the teams that used them -both large and small teams.What is observed, though, is that a large number of software projects -both in large and small enterprises -are in fact done by micro teams.These micro teams typically consist of three or four persons, with just a single or at most two developers, a business analyst and a project manager or surrogate customer.Surprisingly, there are no formal methodologies developed for such micro teams, leaving them to either follow one of the standard methodologies for larger teams or none at all.When micro teams try to apply the standard methodologies to their projects, though, the methodologies often fall short in managing all the issues that are specific to the micro teams because they were essentially developed for large teams in the first place.There is, thus, a need for an exclusive software development framework that will provide guidelines and best practices to such micro teams for developing projects efficiently and successfully.