10. Impact of Cloud Adoption on Agile Software Development

Cloud computing provides a wide range of core infrastructure services such as compute and storage, along with building blocks which can be consumed from both on-premise environments and the Internet to develop cloud-based applications. It offers Platform as a Service capability which allows applications to be built, hosted and run from within managed data centres using programmable APIs or interoperable services exposed by the platform. The objective of this chapter is to study the effects of cloud adoption on software development projects that use agile methodologies. Agile methodologies involve iterative and incremental approaches to software development. The ubiquitous nature of cloud computing makes it an enabler of agile software development. This chapter highlights various aspects of cloud provision that can catalyse agile software development. The chapter provides directions for agile teams that are keen on exploiting the potential of cloud to alleviate the challenges currently faced by them. A case study of an agile development team which adopted cloud is discussed to articulate the real-time benefits and challenges in adopting the cloud environment.