eXPERT approach for e-business software development

Abstract

All Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) developing e-commerce and e-business software have similar business objectives as less time to the market, better quality, and cheaper cost. Current projects are very large and complex and it becomes difficult to handle them. There are different private methods and techniques developed to overcome this problem. The latest studies on the well-known software development methodologies and their applicability to e-projects reveal that they do not fit very well the priorities, the abilities and the corporate culture of SMEs developing e-business or e-commerce applications. Traditional methodologies assume that if the programmers tried hard enough, they could anticipate the complete set of requirements early and reduce cost by eliminating change, which can be reasonable in stable environments, but it is not the case at all in e-projects. In the fast changing environment of e-projects change cannot be eliminated; rather than eliminate rework, the new strategy is to reduce its cost, while retaining quality. There are a number of reports showing increased productivity and software quality by applying Extreme Programming (XP) principles [1]. However, even projects that have adopted several or all XP practices meet project management problems, which are related to estimating and planning the project, both in terms of time and costs. To overcome this obstacle European project eXPERT (IST-2001-34488) has the objective to define agile and integrated approach guiding development of e-projects. The approach, named also eXPERT, focuses on combining XP and Personal Software Process (PSP) practices [2]. The main aims and logics of eXPERT project and underlying software methodologies are presented in this paper. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the objectives of eXPERT project. In section 3 we describe the basic software engineering practices, which will be used – XP and PSP. Section 4 discusses issues in the process of combination of XP and PSP principles. Section 5 concludes the paper.