Elements for a sociotechnical approach of software development with Extreme Programming

Abstract

Considering that software development companies are in business atmospheres subject to frequent changes, Extreme Programming (XP) appears as an alternative that longs for the creation of quality software, in an agile, economic and flexible way. On the other hand, traditional maturity and capacity models like CMMI are characterized by a large amount of activities and artifacts that aim to organize and to protect the software against changes. Firstly, XP and CMMI were considered antagonistic styles of software development and studies carried out so far show different perspectives in relation to how such issue is handled, or they give more value to one of them than to the other, or we verify possible mergings of both. In this sense, the objective of our study is to investigate the relationships between traditional (represented by CMMI) and agile (represented by XP) software development styles. The identification of elements for a sociotechnical approach of software development with XP is aimed, showing a discussion that involves different perceptions in Software Engineering. Starting from a combination between logical reasoning and information extracted from some specialists and related works, possible combinations and similarities among these current styles of software development are presented.

Keywords: Software Engineering, sociotechnical approach of Extreme Programming, plan-driven methods versus agile methods, software development processes.