Design of a New Agile Methodology: Eclectic – An Approach to Overcome Existing Challenges

Abstract

Agile development has proven its benefits over traditional software life cycle development models for more than a decade. Through offering agility as responsiveness to change, its practitioners maintain flexibility to accommodate change even at later stage of development process and simultaneously depict progress through iterative development. This scope creep and rapidly emerging market needs is placing more stringent constraints on agile projects in terms of meeting timelines, containing cost and adhering to quality. Though methodologies offered by agile have spawned several practices that are claimed to be efficacious, but still empirical validation and evolvement of them is required before adopting them as is for any project. This paper proposes and provides the design of a new methodology named as "Eclectic Agile Methodology". The key concept of eclectic methodology is to provide numerous advantages to mid and large scale organizations through enabling them to utilize novel and efficient ways of processes, tools and validations to assess the vast benefits before choosing any methodology upfront. The inspiration for designing this methodology is to address and overcome various untouched challenges in the current existing agile methodologies like but not limited to tightly coupling with upstream and downstream applications, sprint encountering frequent unplanned severity 1 issues which need immediate attention, shared hosted environments along with schema, dependencies outside the project, cross track impacts and distributed team