Agile Software Development Using Cloud Computing: A Case Study
Agile Software Development Using Cloud Computing: A Case Study
January 8, 2020.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2962257
ABSTRACT Agile software development is successful due to self-organizing teams, adaptive planning,
a cooperative environment with respect to communication with clients and team members, small develop-
ment cycles, continuous design improvements, continuous delivery and feedback of clients. Cloud computing
helps to reduce cost, enables scalability and enhances communication through its services. A generic
framework with the conjunction of Agile Development and Cloud Computing (ADCC) proposed in an earlier
study is evaluated in this study. The Malaysia Research and education network (MyRen) cloud is utilized
to implement the framework. A case study is conducted to evaluate the framework. Before conducting the
case study, the participants are educated on the ADCC framework. The results of the case study show that
the performance of agile methods is improved with the usage of the ADCC framework. The improvement is
measured in terms of local and distributed agile development environments.
INDEX TERMS Agile development, case study, cloud-based agile tools, cloud computing.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
VOLUME 8, 2020 4475
M. Younas et al.: Agile Software Development Using Cloud Computing: Case Study
TABLE 1. Primary studies using existing tools for their solution adopted by [18].
TABLE 3. Performance of teams in local / on-premise environment on using agile development and ADCC.
TABLE 4. Performance of team on distributed environment with using agile development and ADCC.
ADCC and without using ADCC) and the development envi- B. APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT SETUP USING ADCC
ronment (such as local and distributed work environment) as FRAMEWORK
shown in Figure 5. The description of each team participating In the second and fourth scenario, the same application
in four scenarios is described in Section III-C. In all the is developed using the ADCC framework which is orga-
scenarios, an application of Hospital Management System nized by the Malaysia Research and education network
(HMS) is developed. The description of HMS is given in (MyRen) cloud. The practical setup of ADCC framework
Section III-B. The application is completed in 6 releases. uses CloudAgility tool for managing project activities.
In the first evaluation, the performance of software devel- Eclipse for PHP is used as a development IDE in this exper-
opment by usage of simple agile and ADCC environment in iment. GitHub is used for code management and versioning.
local / on-premise is compared. The scenario 1 and 2 is used For team communication, Skype and email are used. The
in the first evaluation. In the second evaluation, the perfor- provision of cloud virtual machine is done through the cloud
mance of software development by usage of simple agile and admin. For testing of the software, the Selenium test server
ADCC environment in distributed locations is compared. The is used. The experimental environment is described earlier
scenario 3 and 4 is used in second evaluation. in Section III-A. The performance is measured in terms of
number of days taken to complete three software develop-
A. APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT SETUP USING SIMPLE ment phases.There are two evaluations: first in local devel-
AGILE METHODS opment environment, where the comparison is of scenario
The team developed a web-based application using PHP 1 to scenario 2, in terms of number of days taken to complete
and MySQL. They installed NetBeans IDE and configured three phases. The comparison of both scenarios evaluates the
it for Apache HTTP server, PHP engine, MySQL database difference of only using an agile development process and
server, and then sets up the environment. Each team member ADCC framework, which is an agile development process
installed all the software on their work consoles. The team using a cloud computing environment. The second evaluation
worked together to design phases for solving the problems is in a distributed environment, where the comparison of
they did not share the requirements of the developed applica- [17] S. A. Butt, M. I. Tariq, T. Jamal, A. Ali, J. L. D. Martinez, and
tion. Another study [2] built a ShaMoCloud application and E. De-La-Hoz-Franco, ‘‘Predictive variables for agile development merg-
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the case study, which is a biasness. Under these limitations, ing,’’ IEEE Internet Comput., vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 78–83, May 2014.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT [22] R. Wieringa, N. Maiden, N. Mead, and C. Rolland, ‘‘Requirements
The authors would like to thank Universiti Teknologi engineering paper classification and evaluation criteria: A proposal
Malaysia (UTM) for Trans disciplinary Research Grant and a discussion,’’ Requirements Eng., vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 102–107,
Mar. 2006.
06G23 and the Government College University Faisalabad [23] M. Younas, D. N. A. Jawawi, I. Ghani, M. A. Shah, M. M. Khurshid,
(GCUF), Pakistan, for the students participating in case and S. H. H. Madni, ‘‘Framework for agile development using cloud com-
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(MyRen) cloud, in to provide resources for this research. [24] F. Almudarra and B. Qureshi, ‘‘Issues in adopting agile development
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AHMAD KAMIL MAHMOOD received the MOHD YAZID IDRIS is currently working as
Ph.D. degree. He is currently working as an a Senior Lecturer with the Department of Soft-
Associate Professor with Universiti Teknologi ware Engineering, Faculty of Computing, Univer-
Petronas, Sri Iskandar, Malaysia. siti Teknologi Malaysia.