Comparing agility analysis techniques: AgilAC framework versus ad hoc approach

Abstract

Agile methods have gained ground in academia and industry since their inception. However, identifying whether a development method is in accordance with the agile philosophy has become a challenge because of the diversity and amount of their activities, artifacts and roles. Thus, we defined the AgilAC framework to support agility analysis of development methods. It supports software engineers to better understand the adherence of their methods to agile philosophy. In order to evaluate the applicability of this framework, an experiment was conducted to comparing the AgilAC and the ad hoc analysis, and it is presented in this paper. We adopted two criteria in the comparison: the time spent during the analysis and the correctness of the analysis result. We observed that although the AgilAC requires more time to be applied than the ad hoc analysis, the quality of the analysis results were better. Therefore, it was possible to verify the advantage of the AgilAC over an ad hoc analysis, when considering the correctness of the agility characterization. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.