Evolving to a "lighter" software process: a case study

Many new development processes that characterize themselves as lightweight or agile have become fashionable, e.g. Extreme Programming (XP) (Beck, 2000; Cockburn, 2000; Rising and Janoff, 2000). Each of these processes is focused on maximizing the effectiveness of a small team of developers while anticipating changes in the development environment. These processes are mainly focused on the coding phase of the process and require strict adherence to the techniques set forth (Beck, 1999). Since most of these processes have at least some aspects that might seem radical to a more traditional process, e.g. pair programming (Williams et al., 2000), an issue arises of how to integrate a lightweight process into an existing development/maintenance effort without stalling the effort for retraining in the new techniques? How do we evolve a traditional process to a lighter one? This paper describes the experiences of a development effort within an organization of the United States government as it tried to evolve to a lighter process. The project was subjected to both organizational and technical changes that required the project to be able to adapt rapidly to new development landscapes.