Quality Assurance in Agile Software Development

Abstract

Agile methodologies have become very popular. They are defined in terms of best practices, which aim at developing good quality software faster and cheaper. Unfortunately, agile methodologies do not refer explicitly to quality assurance, which is understood as a planned set of activities performed to provide adequate confidence that a product conforms to established requirements, and which is performed to evaluate the process by which products are developed. The chapter considers the relations of agile practices with software life cycle processes, especially those connected to quality assurance, and tries to answer the question of which agile practices ensure software quality. Next, agile practices associated with quality assurance are assessed from different perspectives and some recommendations for their usage are given. It is observed that modeling has a particular impact on quality assurance.