Tailoring Agile for Medical Software Development: Global South Perspective

Salihu, Yazidu; Bass, Julian; Iyawa, Gloria

Abstract

Agile practices have been adopted in developing various software for Information and Communication Technology (ICT4D) due to their flexibility in empowering development teams to provide higher-quality, customer-aligned software. Medical software developers find it challenging to adopt agile scrum practices because of the stringent safety and regulatory requirements. This research explores how practitioners tailor agile approaches to develop medical software for ICT4D in the Global South context. The study employed a qualitative research methodology and gathered data by engaging 11 highly experienced practitioners developing medical software in India and Nigeria through semi-structured interviews. Snowballing, a purposive technique, and a professional network of experiences were used to identify and recruit the practitioners. The data analysis was informed by grounded theory, which involved open coding of the transcripts, constant comparison, memoing of the data and theoretical saturation. We identified 14 core categories and mapped to five roles and artefacts to enrich emerged memos, which include hybrid agile and plan-based practices, tailored roles, and software quality assurance artefacts. In addition, we developed a new and detailed breakdown of the activities in the clinical tester and CTO roles. Further, we developed a novel classification of agile quality assurance artefacts for medical software development. Our main contribution is that the 14 core categories mapped to roles and artefacts help practitioners build and deploy high-quality medical systems for ICT4D locally. Our findings show that practitioners require additional skills and capabilities in agile tailoring concepts. We discovered a lack of national regulatory mechanisms to guide practitioners, especially in the Nigerian context.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 18th IFIP WG 9.4 International Conference, ICT4D 2024
• Start Date: May 20, 2024
• End Date: May 22, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Aug 1, 2024
• Publication Date: May 20, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jun 9, 2025
• Print ISSN: 1868-4238
• Electronic ISSN: 1868-422X
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 280-295
• Book Title: Implications of Information and Digital Technologies for Development
• ISBN: 978-3-031-66985-9
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-66986-6_21