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Agile Software Development Methods: A Comparative Review1

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Agile Software Development

Abstract

Although agile software development methods have caught the attention of software engineers and researchers worldwide, scientific research still remains quite scarce. The aim of this study is to order and make sense of the different agile approaches that have been proposed. This comparative review is performed from the standpoint of using the following features as the analytical perspectives: project management support, life-cycle coverage, type of practical guidance, adaptability in actual use, type of research objectives and existence of empirical evidence. The results show that agile software development methods cover, without offering any rationale, different phases of the software development life-cycle and that most of these methods fail to provide adequate project management support. Moreover, quite a few methods continue to offer little concrete guidance on how to use their solutions or how to adapt them in different development situations. Empirical evidence after ten years of application remains quite limited. Based on the results, new directions on agile methods are outlined.

1An early version of this chapter was presented at International Conference on Software Engineering in 2003 (ICSE 25).

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the authors participating to the authoring of the wellknown VTT technical report – Agile Software Development Methods: Review and Analysis, which inspired us to take the analysis further. These are Dr. Outi Salo, Jussi Ronkainen and Dr. Juhani Warsta.

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Abrahamsson, P., Oza, N., Siponen, M.T. (2010). Agile Software Development Methods: A Comparative Review1 . In: Dingsøyr, T., Dybå, T., Moe, N. (eds) Agile Software Development. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12575-1_3

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