Improving agile software development by the application of method engineering practices

Despite the vast attention and wide acceptance of the newly engineered agile methods for software development, those methods are seldom linked to the goals of software process improvement (SPI), an approach that aims to provide support for significant improvement of both the quality of those methods as well as the resultant software products. In this paper, we propose an extension to agile methods by adding extra characteristics in order for agile methods to better support SPI. We explain how agile methods can gain those extra attributes through the application of a method engineering approach along with our new tool (4-DAT) that assists method engineers and managers in selecting the most appropriate method fragments for their needed agile methods. Finally, we summarize a number of industrial case studies carried out over several years in order to test and improve the efficiency of our theory of adding SPI to an agile methodological approach.