Foreword by the ChairPanagiotis Sfetsos (Alexander Technological Educational Institution, Greece)Agile methodologies have gained increasing popularity in industry due to their ability to cope with unstable requirements throughout the development life cycle, improving communication between developers and customers, and delivering products in shorter time frames, when compared to traditional development methods. These iterative, incremental and adaptive methods, relying on a set of best practices that are considered to increase quality, completely redefine quality assurance work, from formal roles to day-to-day activities. The developers, following a set of best practices, such as planning game or sprint planning, test driven development (TDD), refactoring, pair programming, continuous integrations, customer collaboration, etc., create value and assure quality through all the development phases, from requirements to the final release. The emergence of agile methodologies seems to be the answer to the drastic degree of change in the modern business and IT environments. Many empirical studies support and evangelize the advantages of agile methods and their practices with respect to quality and some of them will be presented in this thematic track. The first paper “Estrangement Between Classes: Test Coverage-based Assessment of Coupling Strength Between Pairs of Classes”, by George Kakarontzas et al., discusses a new metric, Estrangement Between Classes (EBC), that is derived by executing tests. This metric is based on the statement coverage of tests and provides assessment of the strength of associations among classes. The proposed metric can be used in the context of agile methods of software development during refactorings. The second paper “A Reference Model for Agile Quality Assurance: Combining Agile Methodologies and Maturity Models”, by Fernando Selleri Silva et al., presents AgileQA-RM, an Agile Quality Assurance Reference Model to help organizations in QA implementation. The third paper “A comparative study on the effectiveness of patterns in software libraries and standalone applications”, by Panagiotis Sfetsos et al., presents the results of a case study on software libraries and standalone applications concerning the impact of design patterns in the quality attributes at system level. In summary, the papers in this track cover many different aspects and approaches on quality in agile methods. The findings of these studies are expected to help developers, managers and researchers, in the field of agile methods, to better understand how to approach quality issues when implementing the agile methods and their practices. 
Dr. Panagiotis Sfetsos is currently an Associate Professor with the Information Management and Software Engineering (IMSE) Research Lab of the Department of Information Technology at the Alexander Technological Educational Institution of Thessaloniki, Greece. Additionally, he is a research partner of Software Engineering Group Plase laboratory, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He received his B.Sc. in Computer Science and Statistics from the University of Uppsala, Sweden (1981) and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2007). He is co-editor of the book “Agile Software Development Quality Assurance”, IGI Global 2007, author of many scientific papers and a frequent speaker and tutor in the field of Agile Methods and Open Source Software.
Track Committee:Chair: Panagiotis Sfetsos, Alexander Technological Educational Institution, Thessaloniki, Greece Program Committee:
|
Tracks > Thematic tracks >
