Document Type

Article

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Publication Details

Journal of Software Evolution and Process, Wiley, Vol. 26, Issue 5, pp. 504-512, May 2014

Abstract

Non-safety critical software developers have been reaping the benefits of adopting agile practices for a number of years. However, developers of safety critical software often have concerns about adopting agile practices. Through performing a literature review, this research has identified the perceived barriers to following agile practices when developing medical device software. A questionnaire based survey was also conducted with medical device software developers in Ireland to determine the barriers to adopting agile practices. The survey revealed that half of the respondents develop software in accordance with a plan driven software development lifecycle and that they believe that there are a number of perceived barriers to adopting agile practices when developing regulatory compliant software such as: being contradictory to regulatory requirements; insufficient coverage of risk management activities and the lack of up-front planning. In addition, a comparison is performed between the perceived and actual barriers. Based upon the findings of the literature review and survey, it emerged that no external barriers exist to adopting agile practices when developing medical device software and the barriers that do exists are internal barriers such as getting stakeholder buy in.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.1608

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