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Optimising agile development practices for the maintenance operation: nine heuristics

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Abstract

Agile methods are widely used and successful in many development situations and beginning to attract attention amongst the software maintenance community – both researchers and practitioners. However, it should not be assumed that implementing a well-known agile method for a maintenance department is therefore a trivial endeavour - the maintenance operation differs in some, important respects from development work. Classical accounts of software maintenance emphasise more traditional software engineering processes, whereas recent research accounts of agile maintenance efforts uncritically focus on benefits. In an action research project at Aveva in Denmark we assisted with the optimisation of SCRUM, tailoring the standard process to the immediate needs of the developers. We draw on both theoretical and empirical learning to formulate seven heuristics for maintenance practitioners wishing to go agile.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank our dedicated collaborators at Aveva.

The project was partially funded by the European Union through the CAIN project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Administration, Aarhus University, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark

    Lise Tordrup Heeager

  2. Department of Informatics, Skövde University, PO Box 408, SE-54128, Skövde, Sweden

    Jeremy Rose

  3. Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Jeremy Rose

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  1. Lise Tordrup Heeager
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  2. Jeremy Rose
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Correspondence to Lise Tordrup Heeager.

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Communicated by: Hakan Erdogmus

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Heeager, L.T., Rose, J. Optimising agile development practices for the maintenance operation: nine heuristics. Empir Software Eng 20, 1762–1784 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-014-9335-7

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