Towards a software development methodology for projects in higher education institutions

All educational institutions in the United States have certain particularities that differentiate them from many other public and private institutions. Some of these particularities include, among many others: academic year cycles that set very specific constraints and hard deadlines to the delivery of any tangible and intangible projects the institution is trying to accomplish; an always changing population of constituents that will be associated with the institution for a limited amount of time; and federal and state laws that are always evolving and that require the institutions to promptly act and adapt to fulfill the expectations set, in order to avoid severe lawsuits and fines. As any other teams working in projects for educational institutions, software development teams are also heavily constrained by these particularities. This makes the adoption of Software Development Methodologies that perfectly fit other industries a daunting challenge, if not almost impossible, for these teams. Software development teams in higher education are always in the need of finding a way to adapt to these challenges and efficiently perform their projects in order to address the rapid changes occurring not only in the education sector, but also in the technology industry in general. The purpose of the research in this thesis was to identify opportunities and challenges of software development methodologies used in higher education and to recommend a software development methodology to be used by software development teams working for those institutions