Agile Methodologies in Software Development: An Applied Review for Contemporary Engineering Practice

Abstract

Agile software development process has gained importance in modern software engineering because of its capability to address rapidly evolving requirement, facilitate customer participation and increase delivery productivity. In stable project environments, plan-driven processes work well; in dynamic and uncertain contexts they tend to lose their effectiveness. This paper is a brief applied review of agile methods; it draws upon peer reviewed contemporary literature to provide an extended overview for the evolution, principles, practices and connections to engineering and management context. Key agile frameworks, such as Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, Feature-Driven Development (FDD), Crystal and Adaptive Software Development (ASD) are discussed with a focus on their pragmatic adoption, strengths and weaknesses. In addition, the paper provides a comparison between agile and traditional development methods proposes organizational and scaling issues and shows new trends like large-scale agile as well as DevOps incorporation. It has the potential of helping engineering managers and practitioners make evidence-based decisions when selecting suitable Agile practices for their actual industrial environment by synthesizing existing validated academic and industry evidence on this topic.