Using Lehman's laws to validate the software evolution of agile projects

Abstract

The main focus in software system engineering involves problems associated with upgrading, migrating and evolving existing software system systems. Software evolution is a continuous process which includes activities like software improvement, adaptation and correction that arise after the operational release of the software. Most of the empirical research on software evolution has been conducted using software developed using traditional development methods. We perform an empirical study to validate the evolution of software systems built with agile development methodology. A set of product and process metrics were evaluated for one open source software application and two industrial agile projects. The metric data was used to validate the evolution of agile projects within the context of Lehman's laws of software evolution. Our study shows that Lehman's laws of software evolution are supported by the agile software systems.