Software Development Practices and Frameworks Used in Spain and Costa Rica: A Survey and Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Software development has been impacted by the arrival of agile frameworks, especially in the last two decades. The HELENA Project (Hybrid dEveLopmENt Approaches in software systems development) was developed to identify the use of these frameworks in relation to more traditional ones. As part of this project, a survey was carried out in 55 countries, including Spain and Costa Rica. This paper presents the comparison of the results of these two countries, particularly in relation to two topics: the degree of agility of the activities of the software development life cycle and what are the most used methods and frameworks in each country. The results show similarities in both topics for the two countries, such as the fact that the most agile-oriented activities are Implementation/Coding and Integration/Testing, or the widespread use of agile frameworks with Scrum in the first place, followed by Iterative Development and Kanban. There are, however, some differences, such as a greater presence in Spain of scaling agile frameworks.