| Laurie Williams, Giancarlo Succi, Milorad Stefanovic, and Michele Marchesi Copyright © 2003, Laurie Williams, Giancarlo Succi, Milorad Stefanovic, and Michele Marchesi. All rights reserved. Recently, a new class of software development methodologies has been emerging. These methodologies, termed the agile methodologies, are adaptive rather than predictive, and they are people-oriented rather than process-oriented. Advocates of agile software development methodologies profess that these methods are superior for dealing with change and, therefore, for providing customers with what they want, when they want it, and with acceptable defect rates. The software engineering community has begun to examine these methodologies to judge their impact on the creation of quality software. However, software development organizations often lack the ability to quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of their software development methodology. Additionally, these organizations are frequently unable to assess the efficacy of new practices integrated into their current methodologies. In this chapter, we propose a framework for an empirical investigation of the effectiveness of agile methodologies. Through industrial use of this framework, we, as a software community, can gain valuable information on the prudent use of agile methodologies. |
