Agile Principles as Software Engineering Principles: An Analysis

Abstract

Ever since software engineering was born, over 40 years ago, hundreds of “fundamental principles” for software engineering have been proposed. It is hard to believe that such a young discipline—in fact, any discipline—would rest on such a large number of “fundamental” principles. A few years ago, Séguin and Abran indeed showed, through a detailed analysis of the various principles proposed in the software engineering literature during the 1970–2003 period, that many—in fact most!—of the statements proposed as “fundamental principles” could not be considered as software engineering principles. The analysis method proposed by Séguin and Abran provides, among other things, a rigorous definition of term principle along with a set of criteria allowing to verify whether or not a statement is a software engineering principle. In this paper, we apply this method to the agile principles. More specifically, we examine the principles proposed by the Agile Manifesto as well as those from three well-known agile methods: XP, Scrum, and DSDM. Our analysis results show that many of the statements proposed as agile principles are in fact also software engineering principles.