Capital One Software Development Summer Internship 2021; Rise of Agile Development and its Effects on Software and the Software Development Process

Software is integral in the world today as it controls most of the sociotechnical systems we use. Behind every of software product is a software development methodology that was the backbone to create it. Adoption of software development methodologies (SDM) has been growing in importance, helping project team to structure, plan and control the development of IT Processes, Products and Services.

My research was centered around many research articles about the specifics of software methodologies, my own personal experiences working on teams with SDM’s in industry, and an interview with a subject matter expert who has been implementing SDM solutions in industry for many years. My research set out to answer the three following questions 1) Why is the Waterfall method still being used and does it have valid use cases, 2) How has Agile changed the primary actor’s ways of thinking and how does this change the final software product, and 3) What the criticisms and limits of Agile are and how this affects the sociotechnical systems created using it. Overall, the research was successful. Some of the main interesting findings of the research is that the waterfall SDM is still valuable although the industry consensus is that it is very outdated. Another interesting finding is how much the Agile SDM has made our technology higher quality and end-user focused, leading to a new age of software development.

I think my work will help how teams consider the SDMs to use for a given project. The work could be extended with specific case studies from different projects. It would be interesting to do this research with upcoming SDMs and try to find the industry trend on where the project management industry is moving. It would also be interesting to test these upcoming SDMs and figure out how they change the sociotechnical products created using it.

Finally, I like to thank all those who have assisted me in my work. I would like to thank my university professors for giving me the tools to learn and grow over my years at UVA. I would like to thank my capstone professor Sean Ferguson for guiding me through my research. Finally, I would like to thank my family, Mom Dad Kyra and Dylan, for pushing and guiding me to do my best and reach my goals.