Agile development in the cloud computing environment: A systematic review

Abstract

Background: Agile software development is based on a set of values and principles. The twelve principles are inferred from agile values. Agile principles are composition of evolutionary requirement, simple design, continuous delivery, self-organizing team and face-to-face communication. Due to changing market demand, agile methodology faces problems such as scalability, more effort and cost required in setting up hardware and software infrastructure, availability of skilled resource and ability to build application from multiple locations. Twelve (12) principles may be practiced more appropriately with the support of cloud computing. This merger of agile and cloud computing may provide infrastructure optimization and automation benefits to agile practitioners. Objective: This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) identifies the techniques employed in cloud computing environment that are useful for agile development. In addition, SLR discusses the significance of cloud and its challenges. Method: By applying the SLR procedure, the authors select thirty-seven (37) studies out of six-hundred-forty-seven (647) from 2010 to 2017. Result: The result of SLR shows that the techniques using existing tools were reported in 35%, simulations in 20% and application developed in 15% of the studies. Evaluation of techniques was reported in 32% of the studies. The impact of cloud computing was measured by the classification of four major categories such as transparency 32%, collaboration 50%, development infrastructure 29% and cloud quality attributes in 39%. Furthermore, a large number of tools were reported in primary studies. The challenges posed by cloud adoption in agile was reported as interoperability 13%, security & privacy 18% and rest of the primary studies did not report any other research gaps. Conclusions: The study concludes that agile development in cloud computing environment is an important area in software engineering. There are many open challenges and gaps. In particular, more quality tools, evaluation research and empirical studies are required in this area.