Integração de princípios de desenvolvimento ágil de software ao RUP - um estudo empírico

Abstract

Software development processes are now essential for an organization to obtain acceptable levels of productivity and quality. The integration of agile and traditional development processes is an open and few explored research area, which has attracted the interest of industrial and academic communities in order to take advantage of the strengths of both approaches. However, little is known about the real benefits of existing proposals, as studies are still preliminary and evidence is very sparse. This research aims to investigate the best options for agile and traditional integration by defining a hybrid process that takes advantage of both approaches. A proposal to integrate the practices of Scrum agile method within a development process based on RUP Rational Unified Process was made based on some indications and results in the literature. An empirical study aiming to evaluate the productivity impact of that hybrid Scrum-RUP proposal was also carried out. Five groups of similar projects from a CMMI-ML2 medium-sized company were compared with respect to productivity, some of which were developed using the new Scrum-RUP process and others were developed using the other RUP-based process the company was used to employ. Also interviews were held with developers who participated in the projects to identify the causes of productivity results. Quantitative results have shown that four out of five project groups showed significant productivity increase in Scrum-RUP projects. The results of the interviews have shown that the main causes of productivity increase were related to process, of which the most frequent were communication, collaboration and reduction of documentation. The study shows that it is possible to integrate Scrum practices in the software development process without losing the rigor needed in the desired subprocesses and still get real development productivity gain.