Strengthening the Practices of an Agile Methodology?

An investigation into how the software development process in an agile environment (Extreme Programming) can be aided by intelligent software, leading to the development of a tool that will automate the process of standardising and clarifying source code. The tool will also speed up and aid the testing process, by producing test objects based on the source code, and by providing full test tracking, without having a negative impact on the development process. By making the coding and testing processes more automated, the research aims to evaluate the following hypotheses: 1. That the programmer\u27s productivity can be increased by the use of such a tool 1. That the standardised and clarified source code can reinforce the practices of Collective Code Ownership, Refactoring and Pair Programming 1. That automated testing can reinforce the practices of Code Ownership, Refactoring, Small Releases and Continuous Integration, as stated by Beck (2000)