Marco Scotto

The analysis of commonalities and differences between agile technology and open source software development is needed to understand how advancement approaches have evolved and...

Agile Methods (AMs) are very recent but many of their basic principles are rather old, inherited from the lean production pioneered in the ‘60s at Toyota for the production of...

The four main statements shared by all AMs are listed in the so-called Agile Manifesto: 1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 2. Working software over...

Values are ideals that that a group of people embrace. They can be positive or negative, for example empowerment or control. These values are implicit in the personality or...

The essence of XP, but in general of AMs, is making the customer a part of the team who works very closely with the developers, ideally communicating on a daily basis. However...

Although the situation in the software industry is improved in the last years, the percentage of software project cancelled 18%, or challenged (late, over budget, and with less...

In the early ‘90s, the IBM Consulting Group hired Alistair Cockburn to build a methodology for object-oriented development. Cockburn investigated a large number of software...

Software testing is the process that controls the quality of software (Myers, 1979). Software testing is comprised in any development process and every method of development...

In many AMs, such as XP, the source code does not belong to the developer that wrote it. The common practice is that all the code belongs to the whole team; therefore every...

In this chapter we compare agile and OS development in terms of the adoption of design practices. We review the practices of AMs to identify the agile approaches to the design...

AMs have been developed considering mainly environments that are limited such as companies. For instance, XP defines practices such as 40-hours per week and pair programming that...

An informed introduction to AMs requires the ability to determine whether and when AMs are better than traditional software development methodologies. The risk is that AMs are...

Apart from personal experience, anecdotal evidence and demonstrations are still the most prevalent and diffused methods on which software engineers have to base their knowledge...

As in more traditional development processes also in agile and iterative methodologies, estimation of development effort without imposing overhead on the project and the...

Pair Programming (PP) has usually considered non effective for distributed teams, not working most of the time together (Williams et al., 2000; Baheti et al., 2002). In this...

Existing literature (Boehm, 1981; Brooks, 1987; Cook, 2002) and empirical studies (Basili & Perricone, 1984; Emam & Madhavji, 1995; Marshall & Rossman, 1989) emphasize the...

Surveys covering over 8000 projects indicate that the major sources of software project failure lie less with shortfalls in formal methods skills and more with shortfalls in...

The evaluation of software is a critical task for corporations that are planning to use OSS components. The amount of OSS available is vast and often its quality is not...

This chapter summarizes the results of a questionnaire submitted to 50 companies and focusing on their usage of OSS. The people interviewed are project managers.

The quality of a software development process is based on a large spectrum of various elements that must be identified and assessed. The majority of elements can be measured...

Tools support is extremely important in Agile development. As described in the previous chapters, the Agile development is based on the identification and the subsequent...

The introduction of a GNU/Linux-based desktop system in a large company is often problematic. In literature, several crucial issues represent such a burden, which is often cost...