Do Agile Methods Increase Productivity and Quality

Abstract

The Agile methods popped up in the history of software development methods as a solution to several frequent problems, but what is still not clear is whether they produce a significant improvement in productivity and quality or not, if they are compared to the traditional software development methods. In order to clarify this issue and contribute to a better understanding of these methods, we designed an empirical study in which Agile and traditional methods were compared in an academic context. By applying a traditional method to the development of software products, we managed to obtain a more reproducible result, though we could not obtain evidence of an improvement in quality. On the contrary, by applying an Agile method, we obtained evidence of higher productivity, but with a significant dispersion, an aspect that would be interesting to analyze in future studies.