An empirical study of system design instability metric and design evolution in an agile software process

摘要

In this paper, the authors try to test if the SDI metric can be used to estimate and re-plan software projects in an XP-like agile process and study system design evolution in the agile software process. Two object oriented (OO) systems are developed using an agile process similar to extreme programming (XP) to study the class growth and SDI metrics in the systems. It is concluded that the systems class growth follows observable trends and the SDI metric can indicate project progress with certain trends. Also, the SDI metric is correlated with XP activities.