Paper

ECSS Standard Compliant Agile Software Development - An Industrial Case Study

by E. Ahmad, B. Raza, R. Feldt and T. Nordebäck

Developing software for high-dependability space applications and systems is a formidable task. The industry has a long tradition of developing standards that strictly sets quality goals and prescribes engineering processes and methods to fulfill them. The ECSS standards is a recent addition, but being built on the PSS-05, it has a legacy of plan-driven software processes. With new political and market pressures on the space industry to deliver more software at a lower cost, alternative methods need to be investigated. In particular, the agile development processes studied and practiced in the Software Engineering field at large has tempting properties. This paper presents results from an industrial case study on a company in the European space industry that is using agile software development methods in ECSS projects. We discuss success factors based on detailed process and document analysis as well as empirical data from interviews and questionnaires.

@InProceedings{Ahmad2010AgileECSS,
  author =    "E. Ahmad and B. Raza and R. Feldt and T. Nordebäck",
  title =     "ECSS Standard Compliant Agile Software Development - An Industrial Case Study",
  year =      "2010",
  booktitle = "In Proceedings of the National Conference for Software Engineering (NSEC 2010)",
  pages =     "",
  keywords =  "Software development; Dependability; Agile development; Empirical study; Standards",
  url =       "http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~feldt/publications/ahmad_2010_nsec.html",
}

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