A Comparative Study of Agile Methods: Towards a New Model-based Method

Agile development is an approach for managing and building software projects and teams, in order to satisfy customers by providing adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery and continuous improvement. It is a collection of methodologies such as Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum and Feature Driven Development (FDD). Even if agile methods are rapid and flexible to change, they still suffer from some problems example, difficulty of estimating the effort required at the beginning of the development software life cycle, especially for large projects. Also, it is important to keep design phases sufficiently long to allow for a real maturation of needs and avoid reflection based only on reactions to what has been developed, which can lead to a lot of reworking. As a first step towards a new agile method, this paper aims to provide a comparative study of available agile methods in order to propose a new model-based method.