Emergence Of Agile Software Development Methodologies: A Sri Lankan Software R & D Outlook

Abstract: In software development there exists a tension between quality, cost, and time. Delivering cost competitive quality software in Sri Lanka today‘s time constrained market is a difficult task. Users and producers of software must contend with issues concerning features, those to include and those to exclude. Many traditional software processes are heavy with documentation and rigid control mechanisms making it difficult applying them to different software projects. New families of processes, referred to as Agile processes, are making headway into the Sri Lankan software industry nowadays. These processes focus on code rather than documentation and it consists with individuals and interactions serve an enhanced role in Agile processes. It is a belief among Agile process proponents that people can respond quicker and transfer ideas more rapidly when talking face-to-face than they can when reading or writing documentation. Therefore unlike the traditional processes, they are adaptable, not rigid. Therefore Agile software development methods have caught the attention of software engineers and researchers around Sri Lanka. The research seeks to identify and provide insight into the emergence of Agile methodologies and how software practitioners in Sri Lanka utilizes it key characteristics to succeed in software development projects while dealing with the issues introduced by rapidly changing and unpredictable markets