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Empirical Evidence on Benefits of Agile Methods: How Much We Really Know?

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Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 15452))

Abstract

Agile methods are widely adopted by the industry. Their promise is that the development primarily targets at delivering value to end users in each increment, in contrast to following a pre-made plan. At the same time, the expectation is that as the developers get feedback from the end users early on, also quality of the resulting systems meets the expectation. In this paper, we study the amount of empirical evidence on the benefits of agile methods that has been scientifically confirmed. The goal is to understand perceived benefits and downsides of agile development, as well as the a time line of these studies. As the research method, we have performed a systematic literature review, following the established practices. The results indicate that we have far less empirical results than one would expect, based on the popularity of agile software development.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information Technology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Jussi Rytkönen, Tommi Mikkonen & Niko Mäkitalo

Authors
  1. Jussi Rytkönen
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  2. Tommi Mikkonen
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  3. Niko Mäkitalo
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Correspondence to Jussi Rytkönen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Dietmar Pfahl

  2. Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden

    Javier Gonzalez Huerta

  3. Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Jil Klünder

  4. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Hina Anwar

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Rytkönen, J., Mikkonen, T., Mäkitalo, N. (2025). Empirical Evidence on Benefits of Agile Methods: How Much We Really Know?. In: Pfahl, D., Gonzalez Huerta, J., Klünder, J., Anwar, H. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15452. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78386-9_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78386-9_21

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