Advantages of Agile Software Development, Outsourcing IT Services, End User Involvement, Supply Chain Management, and RFID in SCM

This article discusses the advantages of Agile software development, outsourcing IT services, end user involvement, supply chain management, and RFID in SCM. It also highlights the risks and drawbacks of these practices.

Running head: SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Software Engineering
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SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Answer 1
The major advantages of the Agile software development methods over the Waterfall
model are as follows:
1. The agile method is best suited for projects where there are frequent chances of making
changes whereas, the waterfall model makes it difficult to track back and make frequent
changes (Abrahamsson et al, 2017).
2. In Agile methodology, testing can be performed simultaneously alongside the software
development phase. Whereas in the waterfall methodology, the testing phase starts only
after the whole system has been build.
However, risks with the agile approach are that the net costing and delivery timescales of
the complete project is unpredictable. In addition, the involvement of end users can figuratively
keep adding to the requirements.
Answer 2
The main benefits of outsourcing IT services include:
1. Better disaster recovery- 3rd party data centers are better equipped to get the IT services
back on their feet in real time, after any security or unavoidable disaster.
2. IT expertise- The outsourced vendors have the necessary technical expertise and
sophisticated IT services to decide and maintain the best fit options of IT resource
management.
The main benefits of outsourcing IT services include:
1. Less control- The data is stored on 3rd part servers. This gives the control over the data.

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2. Security- The cloud computing services generally share their resources with other tenants
to make the IT scalable. This leads to security concerns.
Answer 3
Involving the end user into the software development process may prove to be both
advantageous and problematic. Constant communication with the user can help in the better
understanding of the requirements however, this may stretch the development time and cost.
Answer 4
Supply chain is a system of people, information, resources and organizations, who are
involved in the communication of services or products from supplier to customer.
Supply chain management is a broader range of activities that are required to plan,
control and execute a service or product's flow in the business chain (Stadtler 2015).
Answer 5
Radio-Frequency Identification or RFID uses radio waves for reading and capturing
information from tags on objects.
RFID has brought about a revolution in in SCM. It has replaces the barcode technology to
ensure that the right products are handled with no errors or discrepancies in the system.

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References
Abrahamsson, P., Salo, O., Ronkainen, J. and Warsta, J., 2017. Agile software development
methods: Review and analysis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.08439.
Stadtler, H., 2015. Supply chain management: An overview. In Supply chain management and
advanced planning (pp. 3-28). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.