Abstract:
A Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) must be followed by anyone engaged in developing or maintaining a software product, in order for it to function correctly and be delivered on time. Traditional SDLCs, such as the waterfall model, can be regarded the ideal method for developing software for large scale and complex software projects when requirements churn is less frequent, but can offer a number of difficulties in the case of small-scale products, with a high possibility of changing requirements, since there is little room for adapting modifications after the requirements are agreed upon. Agile methodologies such as SCRUM and Extreme Programming (XP) are suitable for small-scale projects since they emphasize on an iterative approach to software development. However, depending on the nature of the projects and the working environment, the SDLC may need to be tweaked to meet the requirements of the people and stakeholders involved. Most of the agile models, though very successful among the software teams, comes with a significant number of practices which need the team agile team to be co-located and the members of the team need to be collaborating face-to-face in meetings, sprint reviews, client collaboration, retrospection meeting etc. Owing the fallout of the COVID-19 outbreak around the globe, the work modality saw a sudden shift from people working together under the same roof in an office to people working remotely from their homes. Such a shift in the work modality affected the practices used by agile teams who were used to building quality software in co-located environment and thus, a number of bottlenecks were found in the existing models. This research will provide an empirical study of a proposed agile model for the development of small-scale software products in an iterative and feature-based approach where the requirements are volatile and the time-torelease is critical in nature, based on SCRUM, XPP, and FDD. Compared to previous models, the suggested approach helped finish projects within 10-15% of the anticipated timeframes. On the other hand, we will examine some of the issues that occurred when a sudden shift in work modality occurred during the COVID-19 outbreak and the challenges that were encountered while implementing existing agile practices, and we will discuss our proposed solutions for overcoming those challenges.
