Adoption of a software development methodology has always been perceived to be a useful and helpful framework that helps the project team to structure, plan and control the development of IT processes, products, and services.
Agile and traditional software development methodology approaches are used in a combination in today’s software development. Agile software development methodology has had a huge impact on how software is developed worldwide. To improve the understanding and to provide better guidance for selecting appropriate software development methodology approaches, it is important to analyze such combinations in practice. Results obtained from an online survey or case studies strongly confirm that hybrid development approaches are widely used in industry.
The agile software development methodology is widely adopted nowadays by software development companies of every kind. Industry case studies show that virtually all organizations use agile processes to some extent, and over half of them have agile software development methodologies as their usual approach to software development. However, managing Agile projects may be challenging, especially in the case of small and medium enterprises.
There are a huge number of case studies, and they didn’t provide a unified view of current practice. Instead, they offered a broad picture of experience and some contradictory findings.
Most studies reported that agile software development methodologies are easy to adopt and work well. The benefits appeared in customer collaboration, work processes for handling defects, learning among developers, thinking ahead for management, focusing on current work for engineers, and software estimation.
Currently, in many software developments companies, teams are using various specific tools (such as Jira, GitLab, and SonarQube) in order to support the development process and the quality of the code and products. This is usually done in a regular retrospective meeting that involves all the team members. As far as the code quality is concerned, those tools provide sufficient information for the Scrum Team.
The scientific literature shows that measurement is integral to understanding and assessing software development projects. Software development methodology involves many processes, and measurement enables companies to characterize, control, predict, and improve those processes. Software process measurement can help in achieving the desired level of performance, capability, and quality. Moreover, measuring software processes also allows learning about the quality of the software product.
The increasing popularity of Agile software development methodology makes understanding software metrics in the agile context more relevant.
Agile’s focus on lightweight practices, continuous delivery of working software, flexible development phases, and minimal documentation make it necessary for measurement programs to be well aligned with the Agile mindset and the principle of simplicity. In the case of process metrics, software processes are complex and intangible, making software process measurement challenging in practice.
Q-Rapids was a collaborative industry-academy project involving three research partners and four companies. It proposed innovative methods and tools to support the software development industry in improving their quality levels (software and process) when using Agile and Rapid software development.
All the partners worked together under a co-creation strategy. Besides, every company adapted the results as they were produced, to the specific needs of the company. The Q-Rapids approach is based on gathering and analyzing data from several sources (software repositories, project management tools, system usage, and quality of service).
Data is aggregated into quality indicators that are rendered to the different stakeholders by means of the QRapids tool. The Q-Rapids tool, because of the project, provides continuous assessment of the quality-related strategic indicators to decision-makers.
There are a set of metrics that are effective for the diagnosed problems:
The metrics can be divided into several categories:
– General metrics. Following the Scrum Team observations, we propose an indication of the total number and the average number of development tasks, a number of tasks based on their status, e.g. completed, closed, and average time of tasks lifetime.
-Task estimation metrics. This category includes the metrics related to planning an effort allocation and analysis of effort/resources consumption. They can indicate the accuracy of such estimation, including an average deviation of estimation in relation to the real effort consumption, the total sum of estimated or used resources as well as the completeness of task estimation.
Similarly, to general metrics, those related to task estimation also can be calculated in different dimensions, such as taking assignees, projects, sprints, or time range into account.
The team usually spends 15 to 20 minutes visualizing and analyzing these selected process metrics. Process metrics are a great fit since this part of the meeting is devoted to people, processes, tools, lessons learned, and how to improve the way of working. Of course, the role of the Product Owner and Scrum Master is to make those discussions and displays interesting, but this turned out to be an easy job for them. The most important advantage of the process metrics is the focus on the process and team effectiveness.
There are many benefits for the companies that are using agile software development methodology: increased transparency, greater knowledge, improved team collaboration, and bigger flexibility.
Nearshore Macedonia is a software development company that is focused mainly on the development of clients’ projects with tight schedules. We are always striving to be always on the edge of the modern technologies working within Agile principles and ISO 27001 standards.
Our clients are assured that their personal information is always safe. Our team works in the software development life cycle in agile with short sprints with great communication on a daily basis.
Contact us at Nearshore Macedonia to discuss your requirements and get the best solution for your software development project. The team of Nearshore Macedonia consists of highly skilled and experienced IT specialists. Our added value lies in the development of challenging web solutions. We invest in long-term relationships and have extensive experience working with international clients.
