Customized agile development process for embedded software development

Agile software development has grown in popularity during the last 10 years. However there is a strong belief that the agile methods are not suitable for embedded, critical or real-time software development, even though multiple studies and cases show differently. The reasons for presumed unfitness of agile methods in embedded software development have mainly based on the feeling of these methods providing no real control, no strict discipline and less rigor engineering practices. Agile development has gained popularity due to the fact that there are still issues in software development industry. Projects fail due to schedule slips, budget surpassing or failure to meet the business needs. These issues are still valid in embedded software development, with multiple new ones rising from the quite complex and hard domain the embedded software developers work in. This work presents a novel process that is based on Feature Driven Development, a software development methodology that can be seen as a runner up to the most popular agile methodologies. Also the rationale of how the new process responds to the common issues in the embedded software development is presented.

Autorentext

Tomi Juhola has a wide range of development experience from embedded systems to modern distributed enterprise systems in various roles, like tester, developer and trainer. Currently he works in a company called Lindorff and shares his time between development lead duties and helping other projects to adopt Scrum and agile methodologies.