Agile software development methodologies : metalanguage crisp and fuzzy comparisons

Abstract EN

Agility in software development attracts both software engineers and researchers equally.

Despite of its importance and vitality, scientific research targeting it is rare.

This paper has been resulted from a comparative study that reviewed, organized, and analyzed five of the famous Agile software development methodologies.

Analysis is done over the development life-cycle process, development participants, practices, scope of use, and adoption in real world.

Study proved that the selected Agile methods are covering different areas of development life cycle either explicitly or implicitly, while some areas are not covered at all.

Project management could be supported in some methodologies although it is not mentioned in other methods.

Leading software corporations supported some Agile methods within their programming tools due to their popularity in real world and simplicity, while some methods are not supported as they are not widely popular and more complex than others.

In this paper, metalanguage had been defined to compare between the selected Agile methods, which are XP, Scrum, ASD, DSDM, FDD.

Two comparisons are conducted the first is a crisp metalanguage comparison while the second is a fuzzy one.

Fuzzy comparison is used to avoid binary judgment by using fuzzy sets and a membership function that had been adopted.