Overview of Open Source Tools for Agile Development

20.1 Introduction

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 reduction of activities that do not provide value to the customer and the ability to change the code without including new and undetected bugs in the code. Tools are an important step towards such objectives and Agile development relies on them to:

• •

  Automate as much as possible activities such as testing, building, etc.

• •

  Support the development enhancing the communication among team members, simplifying the modification to the source code, etc.

• 1.

  Specific tools designed to support to some Agile practices

• 2.

  General-purpose tools that are adopted to support Agile development but not developed for this specific purpose.

• 3.

  Tools to measure the code and extract useful information

In this section, we are going to present a set of tools belonging to both these categories, in particular: automated build tools, continuous integration, version control, issue tracking, synchronous and asynchronous communication, project management, testing, tools to support specific Agile practices, and measurement tools.

This section includes a high level overview of these tools and the links to their home pages to retrieve more information and download them. The Table 1 summarizes the tools presented.