A Flexible Software Development Process for Emergent Organizations

Most of the changes in software development appear to be caused and driven by the need of controlling some form of entropy. According to the above point of view, important events that occurred in the classical software era could be revisited. In particular, we deem that the transition from code-and-fix to the waterfall process has been driven by the attempt of controlling increasing communication entropy. On the other hand, the transition towards iterative processes has been mainly driven by the need of controlling changing or ambiguous requirements. Nowadays, another important change is probably approaching, due to the need of organizations to adapt to the rapid development of commercial technology and global markets. To anticipate such a change, before being actually compelled to do that by environmental constraints, we believe that (i) a fine-grained iterative development, (ii) a teamoriented approach, and (iii) an augmented focus on reviews and tests should be largely adopted by object-oriented software development methodologies. Recently, Extreme Programming (XP) has been proposed as an alternative to design-oriented approaches, and appears suited to promote the above practices. On the other hand, the Unified Process (UP) has been adopted by most of the software companies as a customizable object-oriented software process. UP is built on top of UML, the standard language for describing a software system at different levels of detail and from different views. After comparing XP with UP, in this paper we briefly outline a software process strongly biased towards refactoring, which follows XP recommendations by adopting UML and suitably customizing UP activities.