Guiding Agile Methods Customization

: the AMQuICk Framework

Abstract

In today’s dynamic market environments, producing high quality software rapidly and efficiently is crucial. In order to allow fast and reliable development processes, several agile methodologies emerged in the late 90's and some steadily received growing attention from software practitioners regarding the number of positive experience reports and success stories.
However, their implementation is still challenging in several contexts. Therefore, the companies willing to implement agility out of the ``sweet-spot'' context are seeking for more structured and systematic guidance to situationally adapt their agile practices.
Provided the aforementioned, we designed in this thesis the AMQuICk framework which is intended to be used by experienced software development teams, agile facilitators and/or consultants as a guide to contextualize their development practices.
The framework is composed of a customization life-cycle built upon the Quality
Improvement Paradigm (QIP). Its core artifact consists of a metamodel for authoring agile building blocks called AMQuICk Essence. This metamodel incorporates the necessary elements for structuring an agile repository of practices (a kind of an experience factory), a context model and a customization knowledge base that can be represented in the form of decisional matrices.
Additional operational tools of the framework are facilitation tools (to be used by the facilitator and the agile team): the AMQuICk Backlog and the AMQuICk Capitalization Workshop. The framework has been built iteratively following the Design Science Research methodology. Several case studies where necessary to evaluate its artifacts iteratively.

Date of Award	5 Oct 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Namur
Sponsors	University of Namur
Supervisor	Naji Habra (Supervisor), Vincent Englebert (President), Anthony Cleve (Jury), Benoit Vanderose (Jury), Ivan Jureta (Jury), Geert Poels (Jury) & Monique Snoeck (Jury)