Effects of Agile Methods on Website Quality for Electronic Commerce

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationships between the use of agile methods to develop Internet Websites their quality. An agile method is a new product development process that is often associated with the Internet software industry. Agile methods are characterized by factors of iterative development, customer feedback, well- structured teams, and flexibility. Use of agile methods may improve software quality by injecting customer feedback into a stream of working software versions to converge on a solution. Surveys of 250 software professionals were used to help determine whether the use of agile methods improves the quality of Internet Websites. The central contributions of this study include conceptual models, survey instruments, and original measurement data for agile methods and Website quality. Our findings indicated iterative development and customer feedback were related to Website quality, but well-structured teams and flexibility were not.