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Assessing agile methods: An empirical study

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society volume 10, pages 21–48 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Department, Lancaster University, UK

    Américo Sampaio

  2. Centro de Informática, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil

    Alexandre Vasconcelos

  3. School of Informatics, University of Manchester, UK

    Pedro R. Falcone Sampaio

Authors
  1. Américo Sampaio
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  2. Alexandre Vasconcelos
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  3. Pedro R. Falcone Sampaio
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Sampaio, A., Vasconcelos, A. & Sampaio, P.R.F. Assessing agile methods: An empirical study. J Braz Comp Soc 10, 21–48 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192357

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192357

Keywords

  • Software Process
  • Agile Processes
  • XP
  • XWebProcess
  • Experimentation