Agile Development Methods in Software Engineering and Their Efficiency Analysis

This paper delves into Agile Development Methods in Software Engineering,contrasting them with the traditional Waterfall model and analyzing their efficiency.Agile methods,known for their adaptability and customer-centric approach,have gained prominence in the fast-paced software development industry.These methods,including Scrum,Kanban,and Extreme Programming(XP),are characterized by iterative cycles,collaborative efforts,and a focus on rapid delivery and quality improvement.The paper compares these agile methodologies to the sequential and rigid Waterfall model,highlighting agile’s superior flexibility,adaptability,and responsiveness to changing requirements.It emphasizes the importance of customer involvement in agile processes,which leads to higher satisfaction and better alignment with user expectations.The analysis reveals that agile methods not only enhance the speed of delivery but also improve the overall quality of the software product.The paper concludes that agile methodologies are more effective in today's dynamic software development environment,providing a robust framework for managing complex projects and ensuring the delivery of high-quality,relevant software solutions.

User story clustering in agile development:a framework and an empirical study

Agile development aims at rapidly developing software while embracing the continuous evolution of user requirements along the whole development process.User stories are the primary means of requirements collection and elicitation in the agile development.A project can involve a large amount of user stories,which should be clustered into different groups based on their functionality’s similarity for systematic requirements analysis,effective mapping to developed features,and efficient maintenance.Nevertheless,the current user story clustering is mainly conducted in a manual manner,which is time-consuming and subjective to human bias.In this paper,we propose a novel approach for clustering the user stories automatically on the basis of natural language processing.Specifically,the sentence patterns of each component in a user story are first analysed and determined such that the critical structure in the representative tasks can be automatically extracted based on the user story meta-model.The similarity of user stories is calculated,which can be used to generate the connected graph as the basis of automatic user story clustering.We evaluate the approach based on thirteen datasets,compared against ten baseline techniques.Experimental results show that our clustering approach has higher accuracy,recall rate and F1-score than these baselines.It is demonstrated that the proposed approach can significantly improve the efficacy of user story clustering and thus enhance the overall performance of agile development.The study also highlights promising research directions for more accurate requirements elicitation.

A user-oriented resource scheduling method for improving agile software pattern in cloud environment

The crowdsourcing, as a service pattern in cloud environment, usually aims at the cross-disciplinary cooperation and creating value together with customers and becomes increasingly prevalent. Software process, as a kind of software development and management strategy, is defined as a series of activities implemented by software life cycle and provides a set of rules for various phases of the software engineering to achieve the desired objectives. With the current software development cycle getting shorter, facing more frequent needs change and fierce competition, a new resource management pattern is proposed to respond to these issues agilely by introducing the crowdsourcing service to agile software development for pushing the agility of software process. Then, a user-oriented resource scheduling method is proposed for rational use of various resources in the process and maximizing the benefits of all parties. From the experimental results, the proposed pattern and resources scheduling method reduces greatly the resource of project resource manager and increases the team resource utilization rate, which greatly improves the agility of software process and delivers software products quickly in crowdsourcing pattern.

Quintessence of Traditional and Agile Requirement Engineering

Requirement gathering for software development project is the most crucial stage and thus requirement engineering (RE) occupies the chief position in the software development. Countless techniques concerning the RE processes exist to make sure the requirements are coherent, compact and complete in all respects. In this way different aspects of RE are dissected and detailed upon. A comparison of RE in Agile and RE in Waterfall is expatiated and on the basis of the literature survey the overall Agile RE process is accumulated. Agile being a technique produces high quality software in relatively less time as compared to the conventional waterfall methodology. The paramount objective of this study is to take lessons from RE that Agile method may consider, if quality being the cardinal concern. The study is patterned on the survey of the previous research reported in the coexisting literature and the practices which are being pursued in the area.

Functional Verification for Agile Processor Development: A Case for Workflow Integration

Agile hardware development methodology has been widely adopted over the past decade.Despite the research progress,the industry still doubts its applicability,especially for the functional verification of complicated processor chips.Functional verification commonly employs a simulation-based method of co-simulating the design under test with a reference model and checking the consistency of their outcomes given the same input stimuli.We observe limited collaboration and information exchange through the design and verification processes,dramatically leading to inefficiencies when applying the conventional functional verification workflow to agile development.In this paper,we propose workflow integration with collaborative task delegation and dynamic information exchange as the design principles to effectively address the challenges on functional verification under the agile development model.Based on workflow integration,we enhance the functional verification workflows with a series of novel methodologies and toolchains.The diff-rule based agile verification methodology(DRAV)reduces the overhead of building reference models with runtime execution information from designs under test.We present the RISC-V implementation for DRAV,DiffTest,which adopts information probes to extract internal design behaviors for co-simulation and debugging.It further integrates two plugins,namely XFUZZ for effective test generation guided by design coverage metrics and LightSSS for efficient fault analysis triggered by co-simulation mismatches.We present the integrated workflows for agile hardware development and demonstrate their effectiveness in designing and verifying RISC-V processors with 33 functional bugs found in NutShell.We also illustrate the efficiency of the proposed toolchains with a case study on a functional bug in the L2 cache of XiangShan.

A Script-Based Prototyping Framework to Boost Agile-UX Developments

Prototypes are described as a successful mechanism to incorporate user-experience design （UX） into Agile de- velopments, but their integration into such developments is not exempt from difficulties. Prototypes and final applications are often developed using different tools, which hinders the collaboration between designers and developers and also compli- cates reuse. Moreover, integrating stakeholders such as clients and users into the Agile process of designing, evaluating, and refining a prototype is not straightforward mainly because of its iterative nature. In an attempt to tackle these problems, this work presents the design and implementation of a new framework in which scripting languages are used to code prototyped behaviors. Prototyping is then treated as a separate aspect that coexists and runs together with final functionality. Using this framework communication is enhanced because designers and developers work in parallel on the same software artifact. Prototypes are fully reused and iteratively added with final functionality while prototyped behaviors are removed. They can be also modified on the fly to implement participatory design techniques.