Agile software system development approaches have become popular since the late 1990s. Agile method has been increasingly adopted by big players in software industry such as IBM, Microsoft, Nokia and Philips with a view to improving quality and productivity. Such quality improvement goals must be measured during system development to validate the approach, and there is a need for more qualitati...

Agile Methods are creating a buzz in the software development community, drawing their fair share of advocates and opponents. While some people consider agile methods the best thing that has happened to software development in recent years, other people view them as a backlash to software engineering and compare them to hacking. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the reader to agile method...

Traditionally, software design and development has been following the engineering approach as exemplified by the waterfall model, where specifications have to be fully detailed and agreed upon prior to starting the software construction process. Agile software development is a relatively new approach in which specifications are allowed to evolve even after the beginning of the development proce...

Agile software development process represents a major departure from traditional, plan-based approaches to software engineering. Estimating effort of agile software accurately in early stage of software development life cycle is a major challenge in the software industry. For improving the estimation accuracy, various optimization techniques are used. The Support Vector Regression (SVR) is one ...

Experiences with software technology development projects at ABB Inc. indicated a need for additional flexibility and speed during explorations of applying new technologies to future products. A case study was conducted at ABB to compare and contrast the use of an evolutionary-agile approach with a more traditional incremental approach in two different technology development projects. The study...

As the size and complexity of software systems increase, software development process couldn’t be bound to just codifying some modules that serve needed functionality and finding the appropriate configuration of these modules. Instead, a growing need emerges to sketch a big picture of the whole system that not only identifies basic parts of functionality, but also harmonizes these parts interna...

Agile software development plays a very significant role in software projects. Agile software project is a refined approach to design and direct project processes. An agile project is finished in short sections called iterations. This paper introduces a survey of machine learning approaches for predicting failure of agile software projects. It reviews the uses of machine learning techniques suc...

This chapter is aimed at comprehensively analyzing and defining agile methodologies of software development from a software quality assurance perspective. A unique way of analyzing agile methodologies to reveal the similarities that the authors of the methods never tell you is introduced. The chapter starts by defining agile methodologies from three perspectives: a theoretical definition, a fun...

Reuse in an Agile context is largely an unexplored research topic. On the surface, these two software engineering techniques would appear to be incompatible due to contradictory principles. For example, Agile components are usually accompanied with little or no support materials, which is likely to hamper their reuse. However we propose that Agile Reuse is possible and indeed advantageous. We h...

This paper examines the relationship between the practices of agile software development and usability engineering, and examines how these practices may be integrated within a single methodology. As agile methods have become increasingly popular, they have begun to replace structured approaches to software engineering. Usability engineering has historically tended to follow a development approa...