Quality in Agile Methods

Foreword by the Chair

Panagiotis Sfetsos

The emergence of agile methodologies seems to be the answer to the drastic degree of change in the modern business and IT environments. Agile methodologies have gained popularity due to their ability to cope with unstable requirements throughout the development life cycle, improving communication between developers and customers, and delivering products in shorter time frames, when compared to traditional development methods. These adaptive and flexible methods, relying on a set of best practices that are considered to increase quality, completely redefine quality assurance work, from formal roles to day-to-day activities. The developers, following a set of best practices, such as planning game or sprint planning, test driven development (TDD), refactoring, pair programming, continuous integrations, customer collaboration, etc., create value and assure quality through all the development phases, from requirements to the final release. Many empirical studies support and evangelize the advantages of agile methods and their practices with respect to quality and some of them will be presented in this thematic track.
The first paper, by Adnan Causevic et al., studies the quality of test cases in Test Driven Development. The authors present the results from an experiment specifically designed to evaluate the quality of test cases created by developers who used the test-first and the traditional test-last approaches.
The second paper, by Androklis Mavridis et al., applies real options analysis to software refactorings in agile projects. To get an estimation of the expected cost that is needed to apply the considered refactorings and to the effect of applying them, in the cost of future adoptions the authors conducted a case study.
The third paper, by Hajer Ayed et al., presents an agile metamodel for the customization of agile methodologies to the internal requirements in a given project. The metamodel relies on measurements to provide guidance to agile methodologists for customization during the construction phase and throughout the development process. The authors examine the tailoring of XP and Scrum based on a case study at Intel Shannon in Ireland.
The forth paper, by Panagiotis Sfetsos et al., presents the partial results of an extended replicated pair programming experiment. The series of formal experiments were conducted to investigate, as in the first experiment, the influence of heterogeneous vs homogeneus pair-programming teams with respect to communication, time to complete assignments and overall score.
In summary, the papers in this track cover many different aspects and approaches on quality in agile methods. The findings of these studies are expected to help developers, managers and researchers, in the field of agile methods, to better understand how to approach quality issues when implementing the agile methods and their practices.

Track Committee

Program Committee

Program

Room V1.25
Time Title Authors
14:00–15:30 Session 1
Welcome Panagiotis Sfetsos, Track Chair
Quality of Testing in Test Driven Development Adnan Causevic, Sasikumar Punnekkat, Daniel Sundmark (Malardalen University, Sweden)
Selecting Refactorings: An Option Based Approach Androklis Mavridis, Apostolos Ampatzoglou, Ioannis Stamelos (Aristosle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), Panagiotis Sfetsos, Ignatios Deligiannis (Technological Education Institution of Thessaloniki, Greece)
15:30–16:00 Coffee break
16:00–17:30 Session 2
A metamodel-based approach for customizing and assessing agile methods Hajer Ayed (FUDNP Namur, Belgium), Benoît Vanderose, Naji Habra (University of Namur, Belgium)
Investigating the Impact of Personality and Temperament Traits on Pair Programming: A Controlled Experiment Replication Panagiotis Sfetsos, Panagiotis Adamidis (Alexander Technological Educational Institution, Thessaloniki, Greece), Lefteris Angelis, Ioannis Stamelos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), Ignatios Deligiannis (Alexander Technological Educational Institution, Thessaloniki, Greece)
Final discussions