An evaluation of the degree of agility in six agile methods and its applicability for method engineering

While agile methods are in use in industry, little research has been undertaken into what is meant by agility and how a supposed agile method can be evaluated with regard to its veracity to belong to this category of software development methodological approaches. Here, an analytical framework, called 4-DAT, is developed and applied to six well-known agile methods and, for comparison, two traditional methods. The results indicate the degree of agility to be found in each method, from which a judgement can be made as to whether the appellation of “agile” to that method is appropriate. This information is shown to be useful, for example, when constructing a methodology from method fragments (method engineering) and when comparing agile and traditional methods.