Application of agility in development of IT-Portal for the university: A case study

Abstract

Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams [12]. The main crux of agile software development is to break the development tasks into small increments, which entails minimal planning & documentation and focuses on delivery of the increment rather than the entire software. This thus minimizes the project risk and allows the project to adapt to changes quickly. The Department of Information Technology at Manipal University Dubai had applied the principles of agility to develop the Department Portal through the efforts of its graduating students under supervision of the IT Project Cell. This paper brings out the experiences of this case study and the lessons learnt in this unique experiment. The findings published in this paper may be of particular interest to other Universities or Organizations which are evaluating the options of making changes to their traditional software development methodology to achieve efficiency and effectiveness in their software development processes. Other researchers may use the results of this case study to effectually relate their research observations or conclusions.