Applications of Simulation and AI Search: Assessing the Relative Merits of Agile vs Traditional Software Development

Author

Lemon, Bryan ; Riesbeck, Aaron ; Menzies, Tim ; Price, Justin ; D´Alessandro, Joseph ; Carlsson, Rikard ; Prifiti, Tomi ; Peters, Fayola ; Lu, Hiuhua ; Port, Dan

Author_Institution

Lane Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Electr. Eng., West Virginia Univ., Morgantown, VA, USA

fYear

2009

fDate

16-20 Nov. 2009

Firstpage

580

Lastpage

584

Abstract

This paper augments Boehm-Turner´s model of agile and plan-based software development augmented with an AI search algorithm. The AI search finds the key factors that predict for the success of agile or traditional plan-based software developments. According to our simulations and AI search algorithm: (1) in no case did agile methods perform worse than plan-based approaches; (2) in some cases, agile performed best. Hence, we recommend that the default development practice for organizations be an agile method. The simplicity of this style of analysis begs the question: why is so much time wasted on evidence-less debates on software process when a simple combination of simulation plus automatic search can mature the dialog much faster?

Keywords

digital simulation; planning (artificial intelligence); software prototyping; AI search algorithm; Boehm-Turner model; agile methods; plan-based software developments; software development; software process; Application software; Artificial intelligence; Computational modeling; Computer simulation; Context modeling; Costs; Object oriented modeling; Programming; Search engines; Software engineering;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Automated Software Engineering, 2009. ASE '09. 24th IEEE/ACM International Conference on

Conference_Location

Auckland

ISSN

1938-4300

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-5259-0

Electronic_ISBN

1938-4300

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ASE.2009.42

Filename

5431731