A Soft-Structured Agile Framework for Larger Scale Systems Development

One of the more important issues in the development of larger scale complex systems (product development period of two or more years) is accommodating changes to requirements. Requirements gathered for larger scale systems evolve during lengthy development periods due to changes in software and business environments, new user needs and technological advancements. Agile methods, which focus on accommodating change even late in the development lifecycle, can be adopted for the development of larger scale systems. However, as currently applied, these practices are not always suitable for the development of such systems. We propose a soft-structured framework combining the principles of agile and conventional software development that addresses the issue of rapidly changing requirements for larger scale systems. The framework consists of two parts: (1) a soft-structured requirements gathering approach that reflects the agile philosophy i.e., the agile requirements generation model and (2) a tailored development process that can be applied to either small or larger scale systems.