Traditional software development focuses on the quality of the product via plan-driven methods and the predictability of adopted processes. The agile approach is a movement that sees programming as a craft rather than an engineering or industrial process. It sees plan-driven software development as a dehumanizing activity. This paper reports on an investigation of the two approaches, and their impacts on the teaching and learning of software processes.

Two different software projects were used in the investigation; one was plan-driven (rational unified process (RUP)-based) and the other used the agile approach (extreme programming (XP)-based). Three student teams (each with three or four members) were assigned the RUP-based project. Another three teams (with similar membership) undertook the XP-based project.

For all of the teams, an initial specification document was assigned at the beginning of the semester. Complete implementation of the specification was due after 45 days. This was followed by a second specification document that contained reasonable changes to the system. The implementation of the second specification was due 15 days from its assignment.

An analysis of data led to the conclusion that, first, the differences between the processes mattered little in the effort expended on activities like coding, testing, and integrating. Second, the number of documents and other artifacts created by the RUP-based teams had no significant relationship with the teams’ productivity. Team members reported that they did not derive any benefit from these artifacts. However, given the limited scope of the investigation, I would hesitate to give much credence to such inferences.