Agile Development Methodologies and Natural Language Processing: A Mapping Review

Abstract

Agile software development is one of the most important development paradigms these days. However, there are still some challenges to consider to reduce problems during the documentation process. Some assistive methods have been created to support developers in their documentation activities. In this regard, Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be used to create various related tools (such as assistants) to help with the documentation process. This paper presents the current state-of-the-art NLP techniques used in the agile development documentation process. A mapping review was done to complete the objective, the search strategy is used to obtain relevant studies from ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, SpringerLink, and Willey. The search results after inclusion and exclusion criteria application left 47 relevant papers identified. These papers were analyzed to obtain the most used NLP techniques and NLP toolkits. The toolkits were also classified by the kind of techniques that are available in each of them. In addition, the behavior of the research area over time was analyzed using the relevant paper found by year. We found that performance measuring methods are not standardized, and, in consequence, the works are not easily comparable. In general, the number of related works and its distribution per year shows a growing trend of the works related to this topic in recent years; this indicates that the adoption of NLP techniques to improve agile methodologies is increasing.