Towards a General Framework for Evaluating Software Development Methodologies

It has become essential to scrutinize and evaluate software development methodologies, mainly because of their increasing number and variety. Evaluation is required to gain a better understanding of the features, strengths, and weaknesses of the methodologies. The results of such evaluations can be leveraged to identify the methodology most appropriate for a specific context. Moreover, methodology improvement and evolution can be accelerated using these results. However, despite extensive research, there is still a need for a feature/criterion set that is general enough to allow methodologies to be evaluated regardless of their types. We propose a general evaluation framework which addresses this requirement. In order to improve the applicability of the proposed framework, all the features – general and specific – are arranged in a hierarchy along with their corresponding criteria. Providing different levels of abstraction enables users to choose the suitable criteria based on the context. Major evaluation frameworks for object-oriented, agent-oriented, and aspect-oriented methodologies have been studied and assessed against the proposed framework to demonstrate its reliability and validity.