Advanced Information Systems Engineering

1 Introduction (p. 17)

Agile software development methods have emerged rapidly since the mid 1990’s. The roots of agile methods are placed far beyond the last decade, however [1]. Industry has been keen on adopting agile solutions in recent years. Large software corporations such as Microsoft and SAP have announced publicly of their plans to adopt agile methods. Information systems build in embedded devices such as cars, telecom systems or consumer electronics systems present no exception to this.

Large companies such as Philips, Nokia, British Telecom, to name a few, are either already adopting or plan to adopt agile software solutions as their means to tackle software related challenges. A recent Forrester survey1 suggested that one out of seven software companies already use agile methods. Agile methods have been criticized for the lack of solid, scientifically valid empirical data to back up their claims [2, 3].

Yet, the situation is far from unique in the fields of software and information systems development. Fenton [4] argued that while software professional often seek for rational basis for making a decision about which development method they should adopt, the basis for such rationalization is completely missing. Fenton went as far as claiming that the "methods introduced continue to be based on more on faith than on an empirical data". Based on recent industrial attention, we can suggest that the lack of data has not slowed down the adoption of agile methods.

There is no agreed definition of agile methods in information systems or software engineering fields. In industrial engineering science the situation is quite different. They have proposed 17 competing definitions of the concept of agile manufacturing [5]. In software engineering, the concept of agile software is most often related to the elements presented in the Agile Manifesto (http://www.agilemanifesto.org). To some extent, we can assert that it is the most accepted conceptualization of agile software development as it has received more than 5000 independent signatories over a few years time.

This holds, however, no scientific meaning. Rather, it shows something about the popularity of these methods. In information systems field, the concept of agility emerged in the late 1990’s with studies about internet-speed development [e.g., 6]. Yet, the very concept of agile development still denotes to "more formal than hacking and less formal than traditional methods" [7, p.29].

Mobile information systems, whether they are operated as a stand alone application in mobile terminals or as an access provider to a back end system, are restricted by terminal constraints. Some of these constraints are screen size, keyboard, memory constraints and the battery power. The devices, however, are developing technologically very rapidly and most of the modern handheld devices called smart phones have the processing power of regular computers. Thus, the restrictions that were in place a few years ago do not hold within the next coming years.

Moreover, the mobile telecommunications industry has shown to be comprised of a highly competitive, uncertain and dynamic environment [8]. While, so far, mobile commerce applications have not been very successful, telecommunications companies believe a change in short term due to the adoption of 3G technologies.