Traditional vs Agile development a comparison using chaos theory

Agile software development describes those methods with iterative and incremental development. This development method came into view to overcome the drawbacks of traditional development methods. Although agile development methods have become very popular since the introduction of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, however, there is an ongoing debate about the strengths and weakness of these methods in comparison with traditional ones. In this paper, a new dimension for the comparison between the two methods is presented. We postulate that, since both methods are based mainly on human activity, the two methods can be modeled using Chaos Theory. Source codes that are produced by the two methods in subsequent versions are characterized by a set of software metrics. Modeling and analysis of these metrics are performed using the Chaos Theory. Initial results show that the metrics sequences of both methods are chaotic sequences. Furthermore, agile methods produce more chaotic metrics sequences. However, is being chaotic a good or a bad feature? We argue that sometimes being chaotic is not a weakness, on the contrary, it is a strength.