An Appraisal of Existing Evaluation Frameworks for Agile Methodologies

The emergence of agile software development methodologies, and the sheer number of the variants introduced, has raised the need for evaluation and comparison efforts, mostly in order to facilitate the selection or engineering of an agile methodology aimed at a specific software development situation. But existing evaluation frameworks and comparison tools do not satisfy all the needs of project managers and method engineers. The principal objectives of this paper are to introduce a fundamental basis for evaluation frameworks that target existing challenges, and also to evaluate existing evaluation frameworks in order to identify their shortcomings. To this aim, we have proposed an evaluation criterion set, or meta- criteria, according to which existing evaluation frameworks have been assessed. These meta-criteria define the essential features that an appropriate evaluation framework is expected to possess. The evaluation results show that existing evaluation frameworks do not satisfy typical requirements, and fail to address existing challenges. Therefore, the need still remains for an appropriate and useful evaluation framework for appraising agile methodologies.