An Extreme Programming (XP) Process Analysis and Project Management Tool
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Date
2003-04-20
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Abstract
Increasingly, products in the software industry need to be delivered quickly to beat the competition. These products often have a dynamic and vague set of requirements. As a result, there has recently been a rapidly-rising interest in new approaches to software development. These approaches are lightweight and adaptive and have been called agile process methodologies. Extreme Programming (XP) is one such agile software process methodology.
XP is gaining popularity at a rapid rate, despite the lack of comprehensive, quantifiable studies demonstrating its effectiveness. In today's fast-paced business environments, project managers need to obtain information, track, and manage projects as quickly as possible. Though project management tools are commercially available, none are specifically designed for XP and cannot capture the information regarding the elements specific to XP e.g. user story information, refactoring information, etc. Moreover, existing tools tend to be labor-intensive to learn and use. Additionally, these existing tools are mainly geared toward traditional software processes.
This research involves the development and evaluation of a tool called Bryce. Bryce is a project management and process analysis tool. Bryce facilitates project management and communication within a team by means of data entry, providing elaborate reporting on project status and progress. This data recorded in the tool can also be analyzed to provide invaluable quantitativeinformation in assessing the XP methodology's effectiveness.
Bryce, a web-based tool, was developed using Java Server Pages (JSP). The tool was evaluated through its use in two graduate-level courses, CSC517 [Object-Oriented Languages and Systems, 49 students] and ECE 521/ECE 463 [Computer Design & Technology / Advanced Microprocessor Systems Design, 49 students], and one undergraduate course CSC326 [Software Engineering, 140 students] at North Carolina State University in the Fall 2002 semester.Furthermore, it has also been installed for managing XP projects at two industrial locations: International Business Machines (IBM) and Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories. Through this research, we observed the following:
1. Bryce appears to be an effective tool for managing XP projects.
2. Bryce may aid in research on XP by obtaining quantitative information regarding XP projects.
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Keywords
Bryce, XP Tool, Extreme Programming, XP, Project management
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Degree
MS
Discipline
Computer Science
