Open Access

ARTICLE

A Comparative Analysis of RAD and Agile Technique for Management of Computing Graduation Projects

by Fazal Qudus Khan, Saim Rasheed, Maged Alsheshtawi, Tarig Mohamed Ahmed, Sadeeq Jan

1 Department of Information Technology, FCIT, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
2 University of Khartoum, Department of Computer Science, Khartoum, Sudan.
3 Department of Computer Science & IT, University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan.

* Corresponding Author: Sadeeq Jan. Email: .

Computers, Materials & Continua 2020, 64(2), 777-796. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.010959

Received 09 April 2020; Accepted 20 April 2020; Issue published 10 June 2020

Abstract

Computing students face the problem with time and quality of the work while managing their graduation/senior projects. Rapid Application Development (RAD) model is based on continual user involvement for the process of requirement gathering via prototyping. After each iteration, the developers can validate the requirements that are completed in the iteration. Managing a project with RAD is easier but not flexible. On the other hand, Agile project management techniques focus on flexibility, agility, teamwork and quality based on user stories. Continual user involvement is avoided, which requires extensive maintenance time for fixing iteration and release of the story points. This also makes it necessary to provide onsite training to the users of the application. This research provides the pros and cons of RAD and Agile project management techniques, to help students in deciding the best approach for managing their graduation projects. For the evaluation of these techniques, similar case studies were given to the senior project students (having similar CGPAs) for building similar functionality-based applications. The two projects “Life Organizer” developed and managed using RAD and “Smart Patient Assistant (SPA)” developed and managed through Agile methodology were evaluated against the quality assurance criteria for senior projects. The study found that the project developed with RAD methodology performed 13.33% better in providing extensive and elaborated documentation than the students following the Agile technique. On the other hand, SPA-Agile based project, due to teamwork had 2.5% better implementation than Life Organizer-RAD based project.

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Keywords

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