Traditional heavyweight software development methodologies are rigid, heavily documentation oriented and process oriented. In the present E-Business dominated environment, the above methodologies are hard to follow. In response to this, a new generation of lightweight methodologies such as Extreme Programming (XP) has evolved which has only a few simple rules to adopt, and insist on less documentation. XP proposes four values, a development process and twelve practices. One of the significant benefits among those claimed by the inventors of XP is the reduction of effort in the software development. However, the extent of fulfillment of this claim remains unanswered by empirical and quantitative evidences. Hence, the effects of XP on software development effort are to be investigated. In this study, we developed a process simulation model to analyze the effects of individual XP practices on development effort. System dynamics based simulation, an effective modeling technique for software development process was chosen. This model has accounted for all the twelve practices and processes of XP. We have also introduced a measurement scale for measuring the level of usage of individual XP practices. The factors that affect the cost are collected from literature and a few XP project managers. The process model was simulated for a case study of a typical XP project to investigate the effects of individual XP practices on development effort by varying their usage levels. The decrease in percentage of the development effort for each XP practice when its usage level is varied from minimum to maximum during which all the other practices were maintained at a constant usage level was found. The decrease in percentage of the development effort for each XP practice when its usage level is minimum and maximum was computed and is given below. (i) Planning game -2.67% (ii) Small Release -2.67% (iii) Metaphor -2.01% (iv) Simple design -2.5% (v) Continuous Testing -2.88% (vi) Refactoring -0.677% (vii) On-site Customer -5.48% (viii) Pair programming -4.4% (ix) Collective Code Ownership -4.82% (x) Forty Hours Per Week -2% (xi) Coding Standard -4.82% (xii) Continuous Integration -1.13%. The finding of the present study on the effects of individual XP practices depicts a reduction in software development effort by enhancing their usage levels.
In REF , a simulation model was developed to analyse the effects of almost all XP practices on the software development effort.
The effects of individual XP practices on software development effort
SOEN
Computer Science