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Agile vs. structured distributed software development: A case study

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Abstract

In globally distributed software development, does it matter being agile rather than structured? To answer this question, this paper presents an extensive case study that compares agile (Scrum, XP, etc.) vs. structured (RUP, waterfall) processes to determine if the choice of process impacts aspects such as the overall success and economic savings of distributed projects, the motivation of the development teams, the amount of communication required during development, and the emergence of critical issues. The case study includes data from 66 projects developed in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The results show no significant difference between the outcome of projects following agile processes and structured processes, suggesting that agile and structured processes can be equally effective for globally distributed development. The paper also discusses several qualitative aspects of distributed software development such as the advantages of nearshore vs. offshore, the preferred communication patterns, and the effects on project quality.

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Notes

  1. Other names for such processes are: heavyweight, plan-driven, disciplined. In this article, we will consistently use the term “structured” to denote “non-agile” processes; this is merely a terminological convention and does not entail that agile processes have no structure whatsoever, or that structured processes are completely inflexible.

  2. For structured processes, the term “documentation” mainly denotes requirement specifications; for agile processes, it mainly denotes use-case scenarios and test cases.

  3. The dataset is available at http://se.inf.ethz.ch/data/icgse12.zip. Statistical analysis was performed using IBM SPSS v. 20.

  4. Data about 8 projects.

  5. Data about 10 projects.

  6. We did not provide a definition of the various activities to interviewees, relying on their conventional understanding of the terms in each context. While the same phase may have fairly different connotations in agile rather than structured processes (e.g. requirements in agile projects might refer to user stories), no interviewee voiced doubts about how to assign activities within their projects or asked for clarifications about this aspect.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank all the participants to the study; the ICGSE 2012 attendees—where a preliminary version of this work was presented—for their lively and interesting comments and remarks about our work; the anonymous reviewers of the conference and journal papers; and the guest editors Erran Carmel, Rini van Solingen, Rafael Prickladnicki, and Filippo Lanubile for organizing and managing this special issue of EMSE. This research has been partially funded by the Gebert-Rüf Stiftung.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair of Software Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

    Hans-Christian Estler, Martin Nordio, Carlo A. Furia & Bertrand Meyer

  2. IBM Research, Zurich, Switzerland

    Johannes Schneider

Authors
  1. Hans-Christian Estler
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  2. Martin Nordio
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  3. Carlo A. Furia
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  4. Bertrand Meyer
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  5. Johannes Schneider
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Correspondence to Hans-Christian Estler.

Additional information

Communicated by: Erran Carmel, Rini van Solingen, Rafael Prickladnicki and Filippo Lanubile

A preliminary version of this paper featured at the 7th International

Conference on Global Software Engineering (Estler et al. 2012).

Schneider’s work conducted while affiliated with ETH Zurich.

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Estler, HC., Nordio, M., Furia, C.A. et al. Agile vs. structured distributed software development: A case study . Empir Software Eng 19, 1197–1224 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-013-9271-y

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