Agile Methodologies Selection Toolbox

Agile methodologies have been in the software development scene for more than five years and this has resulted in the proliferation of a number of approaches to this new way of developing software. The initial agile problems were mainly focused on the definition of what agile methodologies are all about and empirical evidence of their successful application. Today one of the most formidable challenges is selecting appropriate agile processes for a given project and the next problem that some practitioners are already faced with is agile certification. This paper presents a selection tool that picks the agile practices relevant to a given environment. The activities that relate to each practice are used to classify the practices into either technical or social. The authors believe that all practices can be classified into technical and social oriented activities. The technical practices are those that relate to design coding and testing and the social practices relate to people issues. The practices are analyzed to this detail in order to simplify the tailoring process. In this case the environment is then viewed from the perspective of technical and social issues and it becomes easier to identify possible things that could be done to tailor the agile practices. The tool is a simple application that can be used with other project planning tools on any PC. This is part of further work based on one of the authors' PhD work. The additions include the development of a computer program to implement the tool.