Software Production Infrastructure to Support Agile Methodologies

In the last few years, software production has dramatically changed: the Internet, globalization, alternative development practices like open source have been important drivers and there are also pressures from ever more educated and informed customers for ever more stringent needs and ever more rapid delivery of solutions, etc. Recently, a set of new software development processes has emerged, addressing typical problems of traditional development techniques, such as keeping the project within the planned budget and deadlines, increasing the quality, satisfying customers, coping with dynamic business needs, etc. These methodologies are called “Agile Methodologies” (AMs) as they are adaptive and not predictive, people oriented and not process oriented, and quality focused (Beck et al., 2001). Organizations that have adopted them report they were able to deliver quality software which is easy to maintain (Beck, 1999) in shorter time. All these methodologies use an object-oriented approach, which is well suited to support an iterative incremental process.