Agile Software Development: Comparative Study

Abstract

Satisfying customers is a primary goal of any development company. It’s achieved by respecting the project content, the deadlines and the budget allocated. To manage a development team and the project they’re working on, the famous methods called "Traditional" comes to consider the project management and the development team, by providing a sequence of steps from the specifications to the final delivery. However, because of the internet evolution, competition between companies is growing. Also, customers' needs are changing, and they want their deliveries as soon as possible. Due to the insufficiency of conventional methods in terms of adapting to these changes, the necessity of a new philosophy is essential, one of the most adopted method to overcome such drawbacks observed when using classic approach is termed "agile", this method provides flexible planning, scalable development and frequent delivery. Agile development is a package of methodologies, each one has its own process and practices, it has evolved continuously since its appearance. Nevertheless, agile development suffers from problems such as the difficulty of estimating the effort and the budget at the beginning of the project. In order to know the common points, advantages and disadvantages, then the next directions of providing a new agile method, the aim of this work consist to present a comparative study of the agile methodologies such as Scrum, XP, FDD, DSDM, Kanban, LSD, ASD, Crystal Family and AUP.

Keywords: Agile software development; Model-based method; XP; Scrum; FDD