As a software organization matures and expands, it often evolves through different styles of organization, for example, beginning with creative chaos as a start-up, then introducing disciplined processes to raise quality, and later regaining agility through light-weight practices. Recently, many firms join collaborative networks to develop software products and platforms for a shared market, constituting “Software Ecosystems”. At each stage of evolution, the software organization aims to overcome critical challenges faced in its earlier stages, while balancing business, organizational, social, and technical forces of change. To illustrate how the evolutionary trajectory of a software development firm is shaped by various interacting forces, we draw upon a longitudinal case study taken from the literature. We use the i* strategic actors modeling framework to help analyze the forces that trigger the transition from one organizational configuration to another.

Various agile software development methodologies, practices, and techniques have been proposed in the last decade, some present novel ideas, while many are simply made up of tasks and techniques borrowed from prominent agile methodologies. Each of these methodologies prescribes a set of practices and techniques which are deemed appropriate for application in a specific context. However, there exists no single method which fits all project situations. This has resulted in the advent of Situational Method Engineering (SME) approaches, which are used for developing software methodologies that are tailored to fit the specific circumstances of the project situation at hand. Since tool support has become an essential prerequisite for widespread adoption of software engineering methods, provision of Computer-Aided Method Engineering (CAME) tools has become a priority. We provide a basis for the application of assembly-based situational method engineering to the development of bespoke agile methodologies. To this aim, a comprehensive set of relevant methodology features has first been identified, spanning the range of possible requirements that a method engineer may define for the agile methodology under development. Based on this set of requirements, a method base has been proposed that contains the method chunks necessary for satisfying these requirements. The proposed method base conforms to the Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM 2.0), and can be immediately plugged into CAME tools which implement this metamodel, including the Eclipse Process Framework Composer (EPFC).

The advent of agile methodologies, though contributing much to software development processes, had a more profound impact on project management processes. Through supporting adaptability in their process frameworks, agile methodologies deviated from conventional project management approaches. This novel attitude has resulted in the emergence of an agile framework for project management. The Agile Project Management Framework (APMF) consists of fine-grained project management practices applied in agile methodologies, and is fast emerging as an alternative to the conventional project management framework. However, there are deficiencies in both frameworks that prevent developers from enhancing each framework to embrace the other. A logical solution is to merge the two frameworks into a Unified Project Management Framework (UPMF). With this objective in mind, we propose a project-management methodology metamodel as the common abstract substrate to fuse the standard framework with its agile counterpart. The proposed Agile Project Management Methodology Metamodel (APM3) has been developed through applying abstraction to the fine-grained constituents of APMF. Based on the generic agile metamodel of APM3, an analytical review of the project management processes of seven prominent agile methodologies has been conducted.