Targeted scrum:apply mission command to agile software development

“Targeted scrum: Apply mission command to Agile Software Development.”

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The article by David Harvie and Arvin Agah attempts to justify that “software engineering,” and mission command are two distinct despite being in the same field. It indicates that both represent complex problem-solving in environments with ever-changing requirements (Harvie & Agah, 2016). The research of the paper emphasizes the modification to agile software developments from the inspiration of the mission commander. It, therefore, suggest why mission command will be a suitable field for drawing inspiration from software engineering. Due to the ever-changing nature, the author proposes that software engineering should be viewed as instances of complex problem-solving in the Department of Defense.

In this paper, the author has discussed the popular agile technologies, where a product is developed in a continuous release. Therefore, end products achieve the requirement of customers. In the empirical data, the paper makes good use of student surveys to assess both qualitative and quantitative processes. However, this can be disadvantageous because the experiments may be based on academic against the industrial setting. Therefore, the author could have failed since it is only guaranteed that the team met twice per week during class time. Generally, organizations that use scrum should fit and work uniformly on a daily basis (Harvie & Agah, 2016). Regarding the academic setting, there could be a problem in the shared classes.

However, the author suggested that students should sterilize the areas after every lesson to prevent students from posting the notes on the whiteboard.

While examining the author’s work, it is found that agile technologies are widely used in different software industry projects because their flexibility provides the way of dealing with everyday issues that are affecting software systems (Sharma, 2016). Based on the critical viewpoint of the paper, the academic calendar presents a significant limitation. For instance, the researchers may be restricted to a semester course to learn both Traditional Scrum and Targeted Scrum to run two projects. Consequently, the time from the usual four weeks is reduced to two, and this may add overhead for the work being done.

Another concern is based on the limited data set. The author researched over a semester with fewer students who gave great insights into the targeted Scrum. Therefore, the author needs to undertake repeated experiments with several software developers to validate the initial results. Also, it appears that the date set was restricted, and the survey is likely to provide a big data as far as analysis is concerned.
Concerning the use of quantifiable measures for measuring the end state, line effort and targeting inspirations from the mission command, the author failed to introduce a penetration testing into the Scrum framework to represent the most used agile software development framework. The scrum was aided to automate the penetration test while developing software projects. Thus, the failure to incorporate specific penetration tests into regular software to improve the overall resistance to software development.
The paper found that the targeted scrum had a negligible improvement on communication. It supports that fact that agile technologies are widely used in different software industries because their flexibility provides the means of dealing with everyday problems facing the development of software systems (Waheed, Muhammed & Sherjeel, 2018). Lastly, agile methodologies provide practices that facilitate communication between developers and customers despite the targeted scrum failing to help in improving the plans and prioritization of software requirements.
References
Harvie, D., & Agah, A. (2016). Targeted Scrum: “Applying Mission Command to Agile Software Development. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering,” 42(5).
Sharma, A. (2016). A Review of Agile Methodology in Software Development. International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology, 3(3).
Waheed, M., Muhammed, S., & Sherjeel, I. (2018). A Review of Popular Agile Software Development Technologies. Journal of Information Technology & Software Engineering, 8(4). Doi: DOI: 10.4172/2165-7866.1000245