Defining Agile Software Quality Assurance

Agile software development methodologies have since their inception claimed to improve the quality of the software product. The agile practitioners have also claimed that use of the agile approach has greatly improved the quality of their products. However, software quality is a rather complex concept; in fact some have defined the entire discipline of software engineering as the production of quality software. Quality according to ISO 9000 is defined as "the totality of characteristics of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs." In the existing agile literature there as not been a comprehensive definition of which characteristics of software quality are improved by the use of agile processes in developing software. In this paper an innovative technique is introduced for evaluating agile methodologies in order to determine which factors of software quality they improve. The technique uses a set of adapted software quality factors as defined by Bertrand Meyer and McCall.