An Ideal Process Model for Agile Methods

We present a software process model that can be effectively applied to the agile software development context. Our approach builds an ideal agile software process model starting from the principles established by the agile community in what is known as the Agile Manifesto. The practices defined by the ideal model can be used to assess the various agile methods to determine any missing or under-emphasized practices or practices needing improvement. We compared the practices defined for two of the most popular agile methods (XP and Scrum) with the ideal model and found that these two methods do not explicitly address in an organized way all the principles in the Manifesto. While these approaches do include practices to regularly review the effectiveness of the particular method and tune the method’s behavior accordingly for a particular product being developed, they lack explicit practices to perform a retrospective focusing on the process, with the goal of adapting and improving the method itself and its future application. We propose a simple practice that could be added to these methods that would address this apparent oversight. This practice would also provide the ability to leverage what was learned from previous projects to the future projects,. We believe the proposed ideal model is complete, flexible, and can be used to assess and propose simple process improvement actions for agile methods. We also point out some open questions about the best way to share the knowledge gained from retrospectives and to do end of project reviews.