Best Practices in Agile Software Development

This report describes an investigation into best practices in agile software development. Agile software development methods represent the latest incarnation of software engineering methods designed to be user-centric, low cost, and focused on rapid delivery of high-quality software systems. This survey of empirical and theoretical studies of agile methods provides a summary of the practices found to be most effective in promoting the creation of high quality software systems using relatively flexible prescriptions in the software development process. Our review of agile development literature, case studies, and empirical findings leads us to a number of conclusions, some of which run counter to the tenets of agile development. First, organizations should take an adaptive, pragmatic approach to an agreed-upon methodology, one that carefully and continually considers how and why elements of agile development may, or may not work well in different project and team contexts. Second, sustained, constructive customer involvement in development projects is a key factor in project success. Third, system development organizations and teams should focus on closely monitoring and managing the tempo of development projects. Core writings in agile methods promote rapid development and small iterations as critical to project success, but published experiences suggest that the appropriate tempo for a given project is always dependent on a range of project, team, and context-specific factors. Finally, the surveyed work suggests that agile development’s lack of an architectural focus often leads to poorly designed software systems, and a level of disorientation on the part of development team members.