Agile Software Development Method, A Comparative Review1
This work addresses the scarcity of scientific research on agile methods for software engineers and researchers, but it is incremental as it primarily reviews and synthesizes existing approaches without introducing new methods.
This study conducted a comparative review of agile software development methods, analyzing them based on features like project management support and empirical evidence, and found that most methods inadequately cover life-cycle phases and lack concrete guidance and empirical validation after ten years of application.
Although agile software development methods have caught the attention of software engineers and researchers worldwide, scientific research still remains quite scarce. The aim of this study is to order and make sense of the different agile approaches that have been proposed. This comparative review is performed from the standpoint of using the following features as the analytical perspectives: project management support, life-cycle coverage, type of practical guidance, adaptability in actual use, type of research objectives and existence of empirical evidence. The results show that agile software development methods cover, without offering any rationale, different phases of the software development life-cycle and that most of these methods fail to provide adequate project management support. Moreover, quite a few methods continue to offer little concrete guidance on how to use their solutions or how to adapt them in different development situations. Empirical evidence after ten years of application remains quite limited. Based on the results, new directions on agile methods are outlined.