A Deep Drive into Software Development Agile Methodologies for Software Quality Assurance

Summary

Agile software development has enhanced software quality assurance from merely considering it as fulfilling the needs of clients, verification, and validation. Agile development innovatively unlocks the novel horizons in software quality assurance. Agility in software development is a step ahead of the conventional development method that aims to meet the clients' changing requirements until the product deployment. This chapter systematically analyses software development agile methodologies from the viewpoint of software quality assurance and presents a technique to understand similarities in diverse agile processes. The understanding of the agile software development methodology is presented from the different perspectives as theoretical, scientific, and contextual.

Even though software development projects that incorporate agile methodologies have extended the margins that cannot be overlooked in the context of product relevance or timely delivery, few are following this innovative methodology of software development because of not having a clear understanding of core agile methodologies. Therefore, this chapter comprehensively defines agile methodologies and reveals the role of agile methodologies over the traditional approaches in the perspective of software quality assurance.

Next, a technique is presented that will expose agile methods viz. scrum, crystal methodology, lean development, Kanban, extreme programming, etc. using a new approach and discuss the adoption apprehensions of agile methodologies. The idea of the proposed technique is to explore each state of art agile methodology focusing on core values and practices and present to incorporate an additional layer in agile projects for quality assurance. The intent is to utilize the expert's knowledge for software process improvement, resulting in better product quality.

The subsequent sections of the chapter will cover the issues and controversies in agile software development that are the grey areas to agile methodology related to innovative thinking, cost of projects developed using agile methodologies, etc. The chapter finally concludes with a discussion on the challenges in agile software development.