Experiences with Agile Methodologies and Practices

Laurie Williams, Assistant Professor, North Carolina State University

Agile software development methodologies claim to be superior for adapting
to the changing needs of customers and projects and to the people on
the team.  As a result, these methodologies are steadily gaining interest
and popularity in industry.  Some examples of agile methodologies are
Extreme Programming (XP), Feature-Driven Development (FDD), and Scrum.
Each of these processes comprises a set of practices, some of which
are currently considered best practices.  Others are controversial and
run contrary to what have been considered sound software engineering
principles.   This talk provides an overview of agile methodologies and
practices and will share the results of empirical studies using XP and
the test-driven development practice.

Bio:

Dr. Laurie Williams is an Assistant Professor at North Carolina State
University.  She received her undergraduate degree in Industrial
Engineering from Lehigh University.  She also received an MBA from
Duke University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University
of Utah.  Prior to returning to academia to obtain her Ph.D., she worked
in industry, for IBM, for nine years.  Dr. Williams has done several
empirical studies on Extreme Programming and its development practices,
pair programming and test-driven development.