Challenging the Artifacts and Practices Adopted in Agile Software Development

Roughly speaking, agile software development methods include the adoption of an iterative life cycle and of special kinds of artifacts and practices. The life cycle is the result of years of improvement in software development starting from waterfall, going through planned long iterations like in the Rational Unified Process, to finally end-up with short, unplanned sprints. The used artifacts and practices nevertheless deserve more research in order to measure development performance, to analyze their optimal uses, and to determine the opportunity of their integration in a custom agile process. This paper highlights the need for challenging the artifacts and practices from a scientific standpoint. While doing so, we briefly discusses the research conducted in the field user stories–that have often been studied in the literature in combination with conceptual modeling–, before outlining the first edition of the Agil-ISE workshop and discussing future directions.