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The article offers information on agile software development. The concept is developed in response to plan-based or traditional methods. The authors examine the benefits and limitations of agile methods to determine its effectiveness. Three overviews conducted in 2002, 2004, and 2005 are presented to discuss the concept of agile development and to describe its status based on the lessons learned from the applications of various agile methods. The authors also present a comparative study of traditional and agile software developments.

The article examines the effectiveness of pair programming (PP) with the help of empirical evidence. Fifteen studies were conducted, out of which eleven compared the effectiveness of isolated pairs. Duration was reported either as the total time a subject took to complete all the assigned programming tasks or as the total time taken to produce code that was assessed as having reached a certain quality standard. For comparisons between pairs and solo programmers, pair effort was reported as twice the duration of each individual in the pair. Quality typically was reported as the number of test cases passed or number of correct solutions of programming tasks. The study reveals that PP leads to increased quality.

Understanding how to implement software process improvement (SRI) successfully is arguably the most challenging issue facing the SPI field today. The SPI literature contains many case studies of successful companies and descriptions of their SRI programs. However, the research efforts to date are limited and inconclusive and without adequate theoretical and psychometric justification. This paper extends and integrates models from prior research by performing an empirical investigation of the key factors for success in SPI. A quantitative survey of 120 software organizations was designed to test the conceptual model and hypotheses of the study. The results indicate that success depends critically on six organizational factors, which explained more than 50 percent of the variance in the outcome variable. The main contribution of the paper is to increase the understanding of the influence of organizational issues by empirically showing that they are at least as important as technology for succeeding with SPI and, thus, to provide researchers and practitioners with important new insights regarding the critical factors of success in SPI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) used by the practitioners. EBSE aims to improve decision making related to software development and maintenance by integrating current best evidence from research with practical experience and human values. This means one does not expect a technology to be universally good or universally bad, only more appropriate in some circumstances and for some organizations. Furthermore, practitioners will need to accumulate empirical research about a technology of interest and evaluate the research from the viewpoint of their specific circumstances. This aim is decidedly ambitious, particularly because the gap between research and practice can be wide. EBSE seeks to close this gap by encouraging a stronger emphasis on methodological rigor while focusing on relevance for practice. This is important because rigor is necessary in any research that purports to be relevant. Moreover, because most software engineering (SE) research has not influenced industrial practice, there's also a pressing need to prevent SE research from remaining an ivory tower activity that emphasizes academic rigor over relevance to practice. INSETS: Asking the Right Question.;Useful Information Sources.;Evidenced-Based Software Engineering QSA..

An overview of how context affects empirical software engineering research and how to better contextualize empirical evidence proposes a contextual framework that answers journalism's "Five Ws": What, Who, Where, When, and Why. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A close look at the evidence underpinning the original concept of lean production and its popular interpretation reveals the inherent challenges of measuring and interpreting evidence for performance differences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the obstacles encountered when implementing development methods that rely on self-managed software teams. It describes the potential advantages of self-managing teams over traditionally managed teams. It cites barriers in instilling self-management to software development teams such as problems in individual commitment, individual leadership and failure to learn. The author suggests organizing cross-training, gathering the team in the same room, and assigning one project to the people one at a time.

Empirically based theories are generally perceived as foundational to science. However, in many disciplines, the nature, role and even the necessity of theories remain matters for debate, particularly in young or practical disciplines such as software engineering. This article reports a systematic review of the explicit use of theory in a comprehensive set of 103 articles reporting experiments, from of a total of 5,453 articles published in major software engineering journals and conferences in the decade 1993-2002. Of the 103 articles, 24 use a total of 40 theories in various ways to explain the cause-effect relationship(s) under investigation. The majority of these use theory in the experimental design to justify research questions and hypotheses, some use theory to provide post hoc explanations of their results, and a few test or modify theory. A third of the theories are proposed by authors of the reviewed articles. The interdisciplinary nature of the theories used is greater than that of research in software engineering in general. We found that theory use and awareness of theoretical issues are present, but that theory-driven research is, as yet, not a major issue in empirical software engineering. Several articles comment explicitly on the lack of relevant theory. We call for an increased awareness of the potential benefits of involving theory, when feasible. To support software engineering researchers who wish to use theory, we show which of the reviewed articles on which topics use which theories for what purposes, as well as details of the theories' characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A total of 295 junior, intermediate, and senior professional Java consultants (99 individuals and 98 pairs) from 29 international consultancy companies in Norway, Sweden, and the UK were hired for one day to participate in a controlled experiment on pair programming. The subjects used professional Java tools to perform several change tasks on two alternative Java systems with different degrees of complexity. The results of this experiment do not support the hypotheses that pair programming in general reduces the time required to solve the tasks correctly or increases the proportion of correct solutions. On the other hand, there is a significant 84 percent increase in effort to perform the tasks correctly, However, on the more complex system, the pair programmers had a 48 percent increase in the proportion of correct solutions but no significant differences in the time taken to solve the tasks correctly. For the simpler system, there was a 20 percent decrease in time taken but no significant differences in correctness. However, the moderating effect of system complexity depends on the programmer expertise of the subjects. The observed benefits of pair programming in terms of correctness on the complex system apply mainly to juniors, whereas the reductions in duration to perform the tasks correctly on the simple system apply mainly to intermediates and seniors. It is possible that the benefits of pair programming will exceed the results obtained in this experiment for larger, more complex tasks and if the pair programmers have a chance to work together aver a longer period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]