Processo de desenvolvimento de software ágil com adição de práticas para melhoria da qualidade dos produtos finais.

Abstract

The tasks which have been executed for more than 10 years on LSD (Distributed System Laboratory) show a consolidation of results in Distributed Systems area, mainly in research on Grids Computing, Cloud computing, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Systems, Fault Tolerance, Distributed Systems Development and Concurrent Systems development and more recently, Industrial Applications and Software Qualification. One of the main projects of the laboratory is the OurGrid, an open grid, free-to-join, which combines computational services and supports a range of applications called bag-of-tasks. OurGrid is free software and there are a significant number of institutions, inside and outside the country, which have used or are still using this technology. In the laboratory scope other products, were also developed such as OurBackup [Oliveira, 2007], a P2P backup system based on social networks, the JIC, OurGrid communication protocol, among others. In ali cases, LSD looked for real problems in the development context and use of these software products by externai customers of the laboratory to develop its research. According to the importance of these projects and for it being one of the initiatives in the great Grid success in Brazil, LSD has been concerned about offering quality products to the community of grid users. Due to the LSD scenario (team composed mostly by graduate students in Computer Science, university history in software development, experience in defining processes as XP1 [XP1, 2002] and OurProcess and the type of software developed, we chose to pursue quality in the products starting with the drafting of a new development process, which is why the quality of the products developed was less than what was expected. This concern for quality has resulted in OurQualityProcess (OQP), a process based on Agile XP [Beck, 2001], with the incorporation of practices from traditional methodology and avoiding excessive intrusiveness in the work of developers. The results obtained with the OQP showed strong signs of improvement in the quality of the products developed through statistical comparisons using a scientific methodology in the study of some cases.