Global agile innovation (gaia)

GLOBAL AGILE INNOVATION (GAIA)                                         2007 – 2010

Principal Investigator: Dr Kieran Conboy                                  €550,000

The Global Agile Innovation (GAIA), an Enterprise Ireland ’Innovation Partnership’ project (the second largest ever issued under this scheme at the time), was successfully completed in October 2010. A collaboration between NUI Galway and Lero – the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, this project implemented in Ireland relevant aspects of the FLEXI project, a pan-European ITEA2 project which focuses on merging agile and innovative practices and assisting industry partners in achieving shorter development lifecycle.

GAIA focused on: (i) agile method training, implementation and customisation; (ii) adoption of project management techniques suitable for an agile development environment; (iii) analysis of how agile methods can be adjusted to ensure adherence to quality standards and (iv) the development of an innovation framework and accompanying metrics to ensure that innovation is facilitated and encouraged in an agile environment.

The project’s industry partners were Fidelity Investments’ Galway facility and Danish company Rovsing’s Limerick office. Fidelity Investments and Rovsing Ireland both implemented these new and emerging approaches, seeking to develop reliable and safe systems, products and services in a global development context efficiently; the goal being to increase quality, productivity and profitability. Specifically, Fidelity leveraged this in their new R&D centre in Galway, while Rovsing used agile methods in the development of mission- and life-critical aerospace and automotive systems.

This project led to over 60 papers published in leading journals and conferences, such as Information Systems Research, the European Journal of Information Systems, Information & Software Technology, the International Conference in Information Systems (ICIS), the European Conference in Information Systems (ECIS), IFIP 8.6 and the XP200n conference series.  Other notable achievements include the establishment of a monthly ’Agile Forum’, a research and industry seminar series established in association with the Information Technology Association, Galway (ITAG), which attracts between 40 and 60 companies per event. The purpose of these was to disseminate findings from the project to the local community; to establish the four partners as key sources of agile knowledge and experience and to create an interactive forum for the discussion of problems regarding agility. As a result, Galway software companies were exposed to best practices among the community.

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