Modeling an agile web maintenance process using system dynamics

To cope effectively with high levels of requirement volatility and frequent system change, practitioners have increasingly adopted iterative and agile methodologies in Web development and maintenance. Despite the increasing acceptance in the agile methods, empirical evidence of its effectiveness is mainly anecdotal. There is a need to understand the dynamic process of agile methodologies through a more structured analytical process. In this paper, we attempt to model the influences of the values of the agile methodologies by analyse the factors that impact the productivity in agile web development and maintenance lifecycles. System dynamics is used to model an agile method-CFMethod. Qualitative analysis of the influence factors in the major maintenance process is conducted. Major influences to the major project concern “velocity of the exploration phase” are modeled using influence diagram. This qualitative model establishes an important step for further quantitative modeling of agile methodologies. Our next research step will be the simulation of Critical Feature Method based on the qualitative model in this paper. The results from Critical Feature Method could be scaled up to other agile methodologies in the future research..