Agile Software Development: A Case for Adequate Decision Support Tools

While there are many purported benefits of agile software development, use of these methods often has a significant impact on project coordination and information management, particularly where large, distributed teams are concerned. Effective coordination requires easily accessible, preferably structured information that is typically unavailable. In this paper we present a comprehensive argument for the need to develop supporting tools for extracting information in agile projects. Such tools may improve the coordination, information management and tracking processes in agile teams with automated highlighting of salient issues arising from project meetings using documentation generated automatically from unstructured information, such as Instant Messaging (IM) history or transcribed audio records of team meetings. We discuss the relevance of our methodology for large-scale, distributed, multi-project agile teams and present guidelines for designing information systems to support such tasks. We present a description and evaluation of the proposed information extraction method using an actual dataset.