Towards a General Framework for Evaluating Software Development Methodologies

• Main Authors: Hesari, S, Mashayekhi, H, Ramsin, R
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acceleration; Computer architecture; Context; Documentation; evaluation criterion; evaluation framework; process feature; Programming; Semantics; Software; software development methodology
• ISSN: 0730-3157
• DOI: 10.1109/COMPSAC.2010.69

It has become essential to scrutinize and evaluate software development methodologies, mainly because of their increasing number and variety. Evaluation is required to gain a better understanding of the features, strengths, and weaknesses of the methodologies. The results of such evaluations can be leveraged to identify the methodology most appropriate for a specific context. Moreover, methodology improvement and evolution can be accelerated using these results. However, despite extensive research, there is still a need for a feature/criterion set that is general enough to allow methodologies to be evaluated regardless of their types. We propose a general evaluation framework which addresses this requirement. In order to improve the applicability of the proposed framework, all the features - general and specific - are arranged in a hierarchy along with their corresponding criteria. Providing different levels of abstraction enables users to choose the suitable criteria based on the context. Major evaluation frameworks for object-oriented, agent-oriented, and aspect-oriented methodologies have been studied and assessed against the proposed framework to demonstrate its reliability and validity.