Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming

Agile software development is now in its teens. It began by performing in relatively small pioneering organizations; then it gained the interest of medium-size companies, academia, and applied research institutions and laboratories; nowadays it runs in organizations of any kind, including major software and systems development companies. Because of such a wide diffusion of Agile in industry, the need for collaboration between academics and practitioners increases, in the aim of improving the body of knowledge available to help managers, system engineers, and software engineers to take their managerial/economical, and architectural/project / technical decisions. During its 15 editions, the XP conference has been a major supporter of the Agile vision of software development. Year after year, the XP conference has been supporting the improvements, observing the growth, of the Agile software development and providing evidence about the advantages that Agile development can provide. In fact, these XP editions brought together industrial practitioners and researchers in the fields of information systems and software development. They examined latest theory, practical applications and implications of agile and lean methods. XP2014, in continuity with the past editions, built a multidisciplinary platform for research and practice on various aspects of agile methods, increased interaction and collaboration between practitioners and researchers, discussed and rethought the relationships, synergies, compatibilities and incompatibilities between agile and lean practices. XP2014 committees included the Research Program Committee and the Experience Report Program Committee. This book presents the regular papers and short papers that the former, and the experience reports that the latter, respectively, accepted for presentation at XP2014. Let’s note that the acceptance process was really selective; specifically, more than 50% of the submitted papers and experience reports were rejected. This book presents chapters concerning or rethinking Agile and Lean development research topics, including: Contracting, Maturity modeling, Value-Based Software Development, Large-Scale Software Development, Methods, Metrics, Testing, Challenges and Perspectives, Software Development in Practice and Teaching at University. The experience reports come from both industry and research institutes, and their topics span from studying global architecture design approaches to investigating challenges involved when advancing software development practices. Hopefully, we reached the goal of doing our best in serving the Agile community by synthesizing the states of the art and practice and tracing its perspectives.