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The Agile Software Engineering (ASE) group at the University of Calgary is headed by Dr. Frank Maurer and focuses on the following research areas:

Tools for Agile Software Teams

The Agile Planning project focuses on the tool support for agile project planning and management. The goal of the project is to transfer agile management practices into larger and distributed teams. Currently, the work focuses on innovative user interface technologies for agile planning. AgilePlanner uses digital tabletops and handwriting recognition for collocated and distributed agile project planning. In addition, we investigate integrating project planning with executable specifications/acceptance tests (see FitClipse)

Executable Acceptance Test Driven Development (EATDD), also called story test driven development, is a process where development of new features only starts after executable tests for it are defined. Executable tests act as an executable specification. EATDD improves communication between customer representatives and the development team. The FitClipse tool helps teams to utilize the power of executable acceptance test driven development by integrating agile planning with acceptance testing.

Our Agile Interaction Design project investigates approaches that help agile teams to not only build useful but also usable software. We are investigating current best practises that integrate interaction design with agile methods. In addition, we are building lightweight tools for agile interaction design that augment release planning as well as discount usability testing. ActiveStory combines low-fi prototyping with distributed usability testing to support agile teams in designing user interactions.

Agile methods are moving from single teams to whole organization. This raises issue of how to coordinate multiple teams and organize software reuse across multiple projects. Our Agile Product Line Engineering project is developing new apporaches that combine software product lines with agile thinking.

Application engineering for digital surfaces

Digital surfaces like tabletop computers and multi-display environments allow for a new class of application to be developed. They support groups and teams at work and play. We are currently investigating better ways to build these innovative applications. Current work focuses on distributed agile planning as well has monitoring and controlling intelligent homes.

Empirical studies on agile software practices

Although there is a lot of anecdotal evidence in the form success stories on agile approaches (XP, Scrum, FDD, ASD, Crystal, DSDM) available, not much of qualitative and quantitative evidence exists on when they work or on why they work. Our group is filling this gap by conducting industrial case studies, surveys and experiments on various aspects of agile methods. All our above mentioned projects have an empirical component. To balance results with research effort, we often us qualitative approaches in our empirical work