Aqua - atividades de qualidade no contexto ágil

Abstract

Background: The term agility has increasingly received attention in Software Engineering, since there is a growing demand for executing and delivering software systems in a shorter and shor ter period of time. Agile software development proposes a rapid and iterative development aiming at meeting all of clients needs and, as a consequence, achieving good results throughout development process. Although this methodology is well-known, it is important to notice that its methods, even the ones which are the most quoted in the scientific literature, do not establish any detailed guidelines so that they can be effectively adopted. Some examples encompass details of activities performed, practices and procedures used and some piece of information which must be documented. However, there are not any case studies which show, practically, the whole pro cess of the adopted method. Aim: This work aimed at contributing in order to achieving improvements in quality of the agile processes by introducing an approach named AQUA - Quality Activities in Agile Context. This approach takes into account th e application of software quality assurance activities such as inspection, test and planning activities which may be used along with any agile method adopted, in the early stag es of requirements elicitation. Method: Only the most quoted methods in the literature were analyzed, from which a generic process was extracted besides a group of artifacts utilized by these methods, supporting, thereby, the definition process of the strategy proposed. Results: This approach was applied by using software requirements developed during a graduate course in Federal University of São Carlos, and the results give insights of its contribution to the improvement in process quality. Conclusion: Although this example had been small, the use of the proposed approach did not make it difficult th e application of the agile method adopted and presented benefits with regard to improvements of process quality.