A Review on the Methods of Evaluating the New Approaches Proposed in the Agile Context

Abstract

In the recent years, Agile is being one of the emerging technologies adopted by numerous organizations.  The Agile methods have not received a wide acceptance within the software development organizations (SDOs), but they are also being extensively employed in different fields and environments. Accordingly, new approaches have been proposed by researchers and practitioners based on the Agile context, however, there is scarce and – sometimes - absence of describing the evaluation process of these approaches. Therefore, this paper reports the findings of an extensive literature search on how the new proposed approaches are being evaluated. The narrative review methodology was employed to criticize and summarize a body of literature retrieved from various scientific sources. The results reveal that there are various methods used for evaluating the proposed Agile approaches. Nevertheless, this review focuses on explaining the five common methods, which are: (1) case study, (2) survey, (3) interview, (3) focus group, and (5) expert review. Thereafter, the authors discuss the key findings and highlight directions for future researches. This study tends to help researchers and practitioners to select the suitable evaluation methods when constructing new Agile approaches.