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A Study Of Software Engineering Practices for Micro Teams

Deshpande, Shweta

Abstract Details

2011, Master of Science, Ohio State University, Computer Science and Engineering.

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 practiced 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.

As a step in that direction, in this thesis we try to address the issue by coming up with a set of practices that are particular to the software development process followed by micro teams with a single developer. We do this by doing a multiple-case case study involving five real world software projects of commercial value that were developed by micro teams with single developers in an academic setting as a part of university-industry collaboration. We focus on the entire development process (from requirements collection to the final implementation) of each project followed by the development teams, and choose a set of steps from the processes that were of special relevance to micro teams.

The thesis makes the following contributions: 1. A definition of a micro team – how it is different from a small/medium/large team 2. It presents a case study of micro team software projects that studies the steps that single developers in micro teams follow while developing software. 3. It presents a set of steps specific to micro teams and single developers, as opposed to being common to a development team of any size. 4. It presents a comparison of these set of steps with the ones followed in existing methodologies. 5. Finally, it presents a set of guidelines that may be used as a basis for developing a separate and complete software development framework for micro teams.

Rajiv Ramnath (Advisor)
Jayashree Ramanathan (Other)
120 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Deshpande, S. (2011). A Study Of Software Engineering Practices for Micro Teams [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1299620089

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Deshpande, Shweta. A Study Of Software Engineering Practices for Micro Teams. 2011. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1299620089.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Deshpande, Shweta. "A Study Of Software Engineering Practices for Micro Teams." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1299620089

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)