Assessing agile methods: An empirical study

Agile software processes emerged to address the issue of building software on time and within the planned budget. To adopt an agile process, it is imperative to analyze and evaluate its effectiveness in supporting high quality software development while complying with stringent time constraints. In this paper we describe an agile method for Web-based application development (XWebProcess) and an experiment conducted with a group of forty senior undergraduate students to assess the quality/speed effectiveness of the proposed method vis-à-vis the effectiveness of Extreme Programming (XP). The results have shown that the process proposed is equally agile when compared to XP, moreover, surveys conducted as part of the experiment pointed out that XWebProcess is more suitable to Web development in dimensions such as requirements gathering, user interface and navigation design, and software testing, therefore leading to better quality software.

[1]  Ivar Jacobson,et al.  The Unified Software Development Process , 1999 .

[2]  Pedro R. Falcone Sampaio,et al.  Towards Reconciling Quality and Agility in Web Application Development , 2004, ICWE Workshops.

[3]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger,et al.  Experimental design and analysis in software engineering: Part 2: how to set up and experiment , 1995, SOEN.

[4]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger.  Experimental design and analysis in software engineering, part 5: analyzing the data , 1995, SOEN.

[5]  David B. Lowe,et al.  Client Needs and the Design Process in Web Projects , 2002, J. Web Eng..

[6]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger,et al.  Experimental design and analysis in software engineering , 1995, Ann. Softw. Eng..

[7]  Martin Fowler,et al.  Refactoring - Improving the Design of Existing Code , 1999, Addison Wesley object technology series.

[8]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger.  Experimental Design and Analysis in Software Engineering: Types of Experimental Design , 1995, SOEN.

[9]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger,et al.  Experimental design and analysis in software engineering, part 4: choosing an experimental design , 1995, SOEN.

[10]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger.  Experimental Design and Analysis in Software Engineering Part 3 : Types of Experimental Design , 2002 .

[11]  Carolyn B. Seaman,et al.  Qualitative Methods in Empirical Studies of Software Engineering , 1999, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[12]  Clemens A. Szyperski,et al.  Component software - beyond object-oriented programming , 2002 .

[13]  K. Beck,et al.  Extreme Programming Explained , 2002 .

[14]  Ray Welland,et al.  Agile Web Engineering (AWE) Process: Multidisciplinary Stakeholders and Team Communication , 2003, ICWE.

[15]  A. J. Hoane,et al.  Design and Analysis in Software Engineering Part 1 : The Language of Case Studies and Formal Experiments , 2004 .

[16]  Roger S. Pressman.  Manager - What a Tangled Web We Weave , 2000, IEEE Softw..

[17]  Paul Clements,et al.  Software product lines - practices and patterns , 2001, SEI series in software engineering.

[18]  Pedro R. Falcone Sampaio,et al.  XWebProcess: Agile Software Development for Web Applications , 2004, ICWE.

[19]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger,et al.  Design and analysis in software engineering: the language of case studies and formal experiments , 1994, SOEN.

[20]  Victor R. Basili,et al.  Experimentation in software engineering , 1986, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[21]  Ron Jeffries,et al.  Extreme Programming Installed , 2000 .

[22]  Daniel Schwabe,et al.  The object-oriented hypermedia design model : Designing hypermedia applications , 1995 .

[23]  Christian Noack,et al.  Constructing Agile Software Processes , 2002 .

[24]  Gustavo Rossi,et al.  The object-oriented hypermedia design model , 1995, CACM.

[25]  M. Fowler.  Improving the Design of Existing Code , 2000 .

[26]  Gerti Kappel,et al.  Web Engineering - Old Wine in New Bottles? , 2004, ICWE.

[27]  Anneke Kleppe,et al.  MDA explained - the Model Driven Architecture: practice and promise , 2003, Addison Wesley object technology series.

[28]  Claes Wohlin,et al.  Experimentation in software engineering: an introduction , 2000 .

[29]  Doug Brian Wallace,et al.  Extreme Programming for Web Projects , 2002 .

[30]  Barry W. Boehm,et al.  Empirical Findings in Agile Methods , 2002, XP/Agile Universe.

[31]  Alistair Cockburn,et al.  Agile Software Development , 2001 .