A practical measure for the agility of software development processes

In the software industry, a large number of projects fail and billions of dollars are spent on failed software projects. Lack of an end user involvement, poor requirements, and unrealistic schedules are some of the top reasons of such failure. Agile software development is an approach that addresses these problems through a real communication between programmers and customers. Thus, there is a need to quantify software agility. In this paper, an approach for quantifying software agility is provided by modeling the key concepts in agile software and proposing a measure that can be used in representing how agile a software development process is. The proposed measure employs information entropy as the main concept related to software agility. The suggested measure is tested on two open source case studies. Experimental results demonstrate the validity and suitability of the agility measure.