Empirical Estimation of Hybrid Model: A Controlled Case Study

Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) are frequently used models among all agile models whereas Rational Unified Process (RUP) is one of the widely used conventional plan driven software development models. The agile and plan driven approaches both have their own strengths and weaknesses. Although RUP model has certain drawbacks, such as tendency to be over budgeted, slow in adaptation to rapidly changing requirements and reputation of being impractical for small and fast paced projects. XP model has certain drawbacks such as weak documentation and poor performance for medium and large development projects. XP has a concrete set of engineering practices that emphasizes on team work where managers, customers and developers are all equal partners in collaborative teams. Scrum is more concerned with the project management. It has seven practices namely Scrum Master, Scrum teams, Product Backlog, Sprint, Sprint Planning Meeting, Daily Scrum Meeting and Sprint Review. Keeping above mentioned context in view, this paper intends to propose a hybrid model naming SPRUP model by combining strengths of Scrum, XP and RUP by eliminating their weaknesses to produce high quality software. The proposed SPRUP model is validated through a controlled case study.