Agile Service Development: Combining Adaptive Methods and Flexible Solutions

Economies around the globe have evolved into being largely service-oriented economies. Consumers no longer just want a printer or a car, they rather ask for a printing service or a mobility service. In addition, service-oriented organizations increasingly exploit new devices, technologies and infrastructures. Agility is the ability to deal with such changing requirements and environments. Agile ways of working embrace change as a positive force and harness it to the organization's competitive advantage.

The approach described in this book focuses on the notion of a service as a piece of functionality that offers value to its customers. Instead of solely looking at agility in the context of system or software development, agility is approached in a broader context. The authors illustrate three kinds of agility that can be found in an agile enterprise: business, process and system agility. These three types of agility reinforce each other and establish the foundation for the agile enterprise. Architecture, patterns, models, and all of the best practices in system development contribute to agile service development and building agile applications.

This book addresses two audiences. On the one hand, it aims at agile and architecture practitioners who are looking for more agile ways of working in designing and building business services or who are interested in extending and improving their agile methods by using models and model-based architectures. On the other hand, it addresses students of (enterprise) architecture and software development or service science courses, both in computer science and in business administration.

As Principal Advisor Enterprise Architecture, Marc Lankhorst is responsible for Novay's activities on enterprise, business and IT architecture. His expertise and interests range from enterprise architecture and business process management to service orientation and model-driven software development. Marc headed the project that developed the ArchiMate^® standard for architecture modelling, described in the book ‘Enterprise Architecture at Work’ (2^nd ed., Springer 2009). He is a board member of the Netherlands Architecture Forum (NAF), one of the editors of Via Nova Architectura, and  a TOGAF^® 9-certified enterprise architect. He holds a M.Sc. from the University of Twente and a Ph.D. from the University of Groningen.