What is Agile Methodologies

This chapter aims to reveal agile techniques that have been applied to software development and have resulted in meaningful improvements in software productivity. Available literature generally state some claims on the gains associated with the use of particular agile methodologies in software development. What lacks however, is a comprehensive analysis of how the application of agile techniques as a family will lead to improvement in software productivity. This chapter therefore provides such details. Software productivity techniques provide ways of measuring three things in order to determine the productivity of software; software products, software production processes and structures, and software production setting. Agile methodologies improve software productivity by focusing on the software production process and structures. The fundamental concern of this chapter is to show that agile methodologies measure the production process activities in a different but effective way from the more traditional approaches. For example, time-to-market is reduced by use of an iterative incremental development approach.