Agile Project Success through Software Quality KPIs

2022

Context: Agile software development is widespread in software development companies because of the benefits it provides. Design and project management metrics can be used during agile software development as a guide for taking decisions and applying corrective actions. Objective: The purpose of the paper is to present the reasons of using software and project management metrics in agile software development methodologies. There are many metrics and variations of these metrics and so this research will try to identify and classify the purposes of using metrics in the context of agile software development. Method: For the purposes of the research, a systematic mapping study was conducted. Results: The research turned out that metrics are used to achieve the following aims: (a) Improving agile processes, (b) Complying with protocols in agile methodologies, (c) Improving software quality during development, (d) Improving the quality of source code, (e) Improving estimation and planning, (f) Increasing productivity. Conclusions: This study provides researchers and practitioners with a basic overview of the use of software and project management metrics in agile software development methodologies, as well as the reasoning behind the use of such metrics. CCS CONCEPTS • General and reference → Cross-computing tools and techniques; Metrics; • Software and its engineering → Software creation and management; Software development process management; Software development methods; Agile software development.

Software Quality Professional Magazine, 2007

An agile process has two primary actors. One is the development team, which commits to develop software for a specific small set of requirements in a limited amount of time, and then develops and tests this software. The other is overall project management, which hands off the requirements and appropriate components to the teams and interfaces with stakeholders such as customers. In a similar vein, metrics for an agile process should have two parts: one for the development team and one for project management. This article outlines metrics for an agile process being used at Brooks Automation. The process uses lightweight metrics at the development team level, where the focus is on developing working code, and more heavyweight metrics at the project management level, where the focus is on delivering a quality release to the customer. The authors describe the process and carry out a goal-question-metric (GQM) analysis to determine the goals and questions for such a process. They then examine the specific metrics used in the process, identifying them as either team-related or project-management-related; compare their scope to that shown by the GQM analysis; and identify issues in the existing metrics. Approaches to rectify those issues are then described.

In this paper you can find a review of articles related to agile testing practices in software quality, looking for theoretical information and real cases applied to testing inside a modern context, comparing them with the standard procedures taking into account their advantages and relevant features. As final result, we determine that agile practices in software quality have wide acceptance and many companies have chosen their use for all their benefits and impact on development software processes in several real applications, not necessarily IT governance ones, since other kind of technical applications have shown excellent results on testing.

Various factors affect the impact of agile factors on the continuous delivery of software projects. This is a major reason why projects perform differently-some failing and some succeeding-when they implement some agile practices in various environments. This is not helped by the fact that many projects work within limited budget while project plans also change-making them to fall into some sort of pressure to meet deadline when they fall behind in their planned work. This study investigates the impact of pair programming, customer involvement, QA Ability, pair testing and test driven development in the pre-release and post-release quality of software projects using system dynamics within a schedule pressure blighted environment. The model is validated using results from a completed medium-sized software. Statistical results suggest that the impact of PP is insignificant on the pre-release quality of the software while TDD and customer involvement both have significant effects on th...

2007

Product or company names used in this set are for identification purposes only. Inclusion of the names of the products or companies does not indicate a claim of ownership by IGI of the trademark or registered trademark.

Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering, 2016

Agile software development methodologies focus on software projects which are behind schedule or highly likely to have a problematic development phase. In the last decade, Agile methods have transformed from cult techniques to mainstream methodologies. Scrum, an Agile software development method, has been widely adopted due to its adaptive nature. This paper presents a metric that measures the quality of the testing process in a Scrum process. As product quality and process quality correlate, improved test quality can ensure high quality products. Also, gaining experience from eight years of successful Scrum implementation at SoftwarePeople, we describe the Scrum process emphasizing the testing process. We propose a metric Product Backlog Rating (PBR) to assess the testing process in Scrum. PBR considers the complexity of the features to be developed in an iteration of Scrum, assesses test ratings and offers a numerical score of the testing process. This metric is able to provide a comprehensive overview of the testing process over the development cycle of a product. We present a case study which shows how the metric is used at Soft-warePeople. The case study explains some features that have been developed in a Sprint in terms of feature complexity and potential test assessment difficulties and shows how PBR is calculated during the Sprint. We propose a test process assessment metric that provides insights into the Scrum testing process. However, the metric needs further evaluation considering associated resources (e.g., quality assurance engineers, the length of the Scrum cycle).

Procedia Economics and Finance, 2014

Agile methodologies are helpful to develop and implement systems to meet the market demands in a faster way, by helping various organizations to evaluate projects.Agile testing strategy is one of the methodologies that is suitable for implementation of IT projects. This paper focuses on IT projects related to manufacturing sector by deriving the significance of various agile project testing attributes across every phase of information systems development life cycle (SDLC) for faster time to market the products. The attributes include prioritization of features according to customer requirement, early customer involvement, incremental and iterative sprints, flexible development environment with less documentation and complexity management. The results highlight the varying significance of these attributes and identifying the key attributes in each project phase; thereby helping software professionals and project managers by providing a handy framework for focusing on phase-wise core attributes that might be essential for tacklingrelated project issues and fullfilling the managerial priorities.

European Journal of Business and Management, 2015

In spite of the marked benefits agile development brings, it has several shortcomings in quantitative quality measurement, especially in evaluating the performance of individual software engineers. The evaluation criteria for software engineers' performance have been traditionally driven by metrics that don't fit into agiledevelopment principles. This study proposes a measurement framework to evaluate the performance of software engineers. The proposed measurement framework aligns with agile-development core values and principles. This framework can be applied to various agile methods, although the research assumes the use of the Scrum methodology by the software-development team and organization. The proposed framework is simple and doesn't impose overhead on the development team or organization, as it is driven by key agile and Scrum development metrics such as team velocity, escaped-defects rate, defect-cycle time, defect spill-over rate, and individual communication and social skills.

Many software projects still experience delays, exceed budget or fail to deliver the expected quality due to poor project management, often caused by a lack of information about the real status of the project. This is particularly problematic in agile projects with their dynamic team configurations, high number of iterations and short development cycle times. A key challenge to effectively and efficiently manage agile projects is to select and implement both the right product and process quality metrics. We develop a catalogue of 40 metrics covering different product and process quality criteria. The catalogue is then used to select and evaluate a specific set of metrics that are implemented in an agile software development project. Our preliminary findings show that while the combination of product and process quality metrics is important, more research into their interdependencies and selection criteria is needed.

2012

Agile software development (ASD) methods were introduced as a reaction to traditional software development methods. Principles of these methods are different from traditional methods and so there are some different processes and activities in agile methods comparing to traditional methods. Thus ASD methods require different measurement practices comparing to traditional methods. Agile teams often do their projects in the simplest and most effective way so, measurement practices in agile methods are more important than traditional methods, because lack of appropriate and effective measurement practices, will increase risk of project. The aims of this paper are investigation on current measurement practices in ASD methods, collecting them together in one study and also reviewing agile version of Common Software Measurement International Consortium (COSMIC) publication.

2021

Due to required efforts and the challenges involved in understanding the quantification of software quality, researchers have chosen varying quality attributes to describe the quantification of software quality. The degree of software quality is achieved from the standards and quality attributes at each development process: the adherence of software engineering principles towards realizing a product of good quality. In agile environment, the software engineering process ensures that qualities of interest are built-in and to produce software product with an acceptable level of quality. Thus, this study is aimed at quantifying six related software quality attributes. The specific objectives include identifying the software quality attributes, the design of the algorithm for measurement metrics, and to perform relational analytics of each attribute with respect to the software quality. The methodology followed an exploratory evaluation of measurement and metrics and their role in quantifying software quality in agile development environment. The study adopted existing metrics to quantify software quality attributes. Twelve opensource software projects were tested for 6 specific quality attributes and each result is quantified and presented. Results show that software number 2 (SW2) has a maintainability value of 6 minutes, 50% availability, and 0.62 reliability values. It implies that a high value of maintainability does not translate to high reliability. These values establish the relationship between attributes and enhances developers and users' understanding of the software quality and its attributes.

2008

This paper discusses software test metrics and their ability to show objective evidence necessary to make process improvements in a development organization. When used properly, test metrics assist in the improvement of the software development process by providing pragmatic, objective evidence of process change initiatives. This paper also describes several test metrics that can be implemented, a method for creating a practical approach to tracking & interpreting the metrics, and illustrates one organization's use of test metrics to prove the effectiveness of process changes. Also, this paper provides the Balanced Productivity Metrics (BPM) strategy and approach in order to design and produce useful project metrics from basic test planning and defect data. Software test metrics is a useful for test managers, which aids in precise estimation of project effort, addresses the interests of metric group, software managers of the software organization who are interested in estimating software test effort and improve both development and testing processes.

2012

We present an analysis of the evolution of a Web application project developed with object-oriented technology and an agile process. During the development we systematically performed measure­ments on the source code, using software metrics that have been proved to be correlated with soft­ware quality, such as the Chidamber and Kemerer suite and Lines Of Code metrics. We also com­puted metrics derived from the class dependency graph, including metrics derived from Social Net­work Analysis. The ap­plication development evolved through phases, character­ized by a different level of adoption of some key ag­ile prac­tices – namely pair programming, test-based development and refactoring. The evolution of the metrics of the system, and their behavior related to the agile practices adoption level, is presented and discussed. We show that, in the reported case study, a few metrics are enough to characterize with high significance the various phases of the project. Conse­quently, software quality, as measured using these metrics, looks directly related to agile practices adoption.

2007

Software testing needs to be measured in similar terms as overall software development process (SDP) in order to understand its true progress and make informed decisions. Basic considerations of Software Testing Metrics Framework (STMF) and some commonly used testing metrics and where in testing process they apply are described in this, Part 1 article. Typically, software development is measured in terms of overall progress in meeting functional and business goals. By considering testing dimensions other than cost and schedule, managers and other team members can better understand and optimize the testing process, in effect opening the black box and managing testing more effectively were described in Part 2 article. Key-Words:software testing, testing metrics, size estimation, effort estimation, test effectiveness evaluation.

Journal of Advanced Computer Science & Technology, 2015

A novel methodology, result of 10 years of in-field testing, which makes possible the convergence of different types of models and quality standards for Engineering and Computer Science Faculties, is presented. Since most softwaredeveloping companies are small and medium sized, the projects developed must focuson SCRUM and Extreme Programming (XP), opposed to a RUP, which is quite heavy, as well as on Personal Software Process (PSP) and Team Software Process (TSP), which provide students with competences and a structured framework. ISO 90003:2004 norm is employed to define the processes by means of a quality system without new requirements or changing the existing ones. Also, the model is based on ISO/IEC 25000 (ISO (IEC 9126 -ISO/IEC 14598)) to allow comparing software built by different metrics.