Agile Software Development of Mobile Information Systems

Agile software development methods are quickly being adopted by the software industry. Concerns have been raised whether agile methods are suitable for any given information systems development domain. Indeed, quite little is known empirically about the validity of agile methods in most of the industrial domains. Mobile information systems present no exception in this sense. Yet, they are subject to frequent requirements changes in terms of changing business needs and technology, and their market is highly competitive. Moreover, most of these systems are far away from so called agile home ground. This talk presents the need for agile methods in the focal domain, identifies their shortcomings on the basis of three large-scale case studies from industry. All of the cases deal with the development of mobile information system and come from Nokia, F-Secure and Philips. The talk also discusses the possible strategies for deploying agile solutions in practice.