In a fast moving world, competitive pressure demands rapid software development. The tools and methodologies used by software developers must permit flexible responses to changing customer needs. Software tools have evolved to meet this challenge. As software “refactoring” has become a practical possibility many small and medium sized projects have turned to so-called agile development methods. These highly iterative approaches have no extended periods of requirements gathering or functional specification. Consequently, many existing Software Process causal models do not match modern development styles. We present a model for defect prediction in an eXtreme Programming environment, and demonstrate how existing causal models can be adapted to handle agile development methods.

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