Popular agile approaches in software development: Review and analysis

The selection of a software development methodology is vital activity in any software project. It has a great impact on customer satisfaction and business welfare. Normally the selection is based on experience or in some cases a rational. In the third world countries and especially in Sudan, where this research is conducted, the choice of a software methodology is always a struggle in software companies. Probably is because most of these companies whether are startup or have humble resources such as small to medium enterprises (SMEs). Currently the government of Sudan (the main buyer of local software products) is pushing the software industry to produce quality products and to reduce risks of buying software products from foreign companies, therefore quality products is real concern for these companies. Usually, start-up or SMEs software companies seeking for rapid and agile way of development accompanied with plug & play engineering practices. Agile software development methodologies become lately the way forward quality assurance. Since the last decade, agile methods have increased popularity and usage among software industries. These methods came to tackle requirement changes quickly, satisfy customers, support interaction, communication and produce high quality products. There are a lot of debates in the literature about agile methods especially on the most newest and used ones. However, academic research on how these SMEs can select the appropriate method still limited. The aim of this paper is to filling this gap by systematically reviewing the existing literature on the most popular agile software development methodologies. This paper has three purposes: first, it proposes a definition and discussion of the most popular agile software development methods. Second, it explores the software SMEs challenges and formulates it into criteria for comparison purposes. Third, it compares these methods and shows their similarities and differences against the defined criteria. Based on this analysis, future research needs are identified and discussed.