Agile Software Development. Comparison and Evaluation of Existing Tools

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2015 in the subject Computer Science - Software, grade: 1, Riphah International University Islamabad, course: Agile Software Development, language: English, abstract: Agile software development is a group of software development methods in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continuous improvement and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. [1] In the agile software development different tools are used for the management of projects. Every one use these tools according to their need and requirements. If we take a look on the past then we came to know that different companies were mainly used MS Excel, word, and PowerPoint for storing and managing requirements and product backlogs and MS PowerPoint for managing projects. The development teams, on the other hand, used simple physical tools such as paper, sticky notes, and whiteboards. But it is experienced that the simple tools were insufficient for and unsupportive in managing large numbers of requirements and projects. So we got the need of some tools to manage and control all of the tasks in our project like scheduling, activities, planning, estimating, features, meetings, roles and release date etc.. Therefore a large number of tools are available in the market but the problem is to find the best one of them. Our task was to perform a detailed analysis of the agile tools, their usage and their needs on the basis of project work load. In this paper we present the result of our survey to find out a best agile project management tool to meet the company requirement and to support their needs. Therefore we have completed the survey on different tools practically like AgileZen, Rally, Versionone and some of others. This paper is organized as follows. Section 1 is based on the introduction of the problem and a brief knowledge of agile and agile tools. Section 2 is about the agile methodologies and of their usage. Section 3 is based on the detail note on existing agile tools and on their features. Section 4 is lists and describes the comparison of these tools on the basis of their features and usage which we have used in our survey. Section 5 is based on the evaluation criteria and on the detailed features of our chosen agile tool. Section 6 present the evaluation result of our own tool based on the criteria described in previous section. Section 7 describes the conclusion and observation and gives a brief result of this research.