The impact of methods and techniques on outcomes from agile software development projects

Abstract

Agile software development methods have become increasingly popular since the late 1990s, and may offer improved outcomes for software development projects when compared to more traditional approaches. However there has previously been little published empirical evidence to either prove or disprove this assertion. A survey carried out in March 2006 gathered responses from a large number of software development professionals who were using many different methods, both traditional and agile. A statistical analysis of this data reveals that agile methods do indeed improve outcomes from software development projects in terms of quality, satisfaction, and productivity, without a significant increase in cost. However, adoption of methods appears to involve a high degree of adaptivity, with many methods being used in combination and sets of techniques being adopted on an ad hoc basis. In this context, our analysis suggests that choosing specific combinations of methods can be particularly beneficial. However, we also find that successful adoption of an agile method is to some extent dependent on rigorous integration of certain core techniques. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.