Lucas Layman

I am currently enrolled as a full-time PhD student and working as a research assistant under LaurieWilliams investigating the effects of AgileSoftwareDevelopment practices, such as ExtremeProgramming, in industry. To this end, I am currently working with industrial software organizations to study the effects of Agile practices on requirements engineering, production quality, and customer satisfaction.

The majority of my research activities at N.C. State have centered around developing an empirically-based, fundamentally sound benchmark for evaluating the effects of adopting the ExtremeProgramming methodology. The original version of the XpEvaluationFramework began as a collaboration between my advisor LaurieWilliams, BillKrebs of IBM, and myself. The initial formulation of the XpEf came about as we were attempting to collect relevant information about an IBM team that was using XP in an industrial environment. We wanted to capture characteristics of the team and the project, quantify the extent to which they were using XP, and the results of their project with regard to business-oriented such as quality, customer satisfaction, and productivity.

A more up-to-date webpage (including contact information) may be found at: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~lmlayma2 ( BrokenLink )

Like my undergraduate advisor, KeithGallagher?, I am interested in helping those software developers "in the trenches." To me, this means studying and researching the most effective techniques for producing software. "Effective" can have many meanings, whether it refers to the level of software quality, the amount of team productivity, the level of customer satisfaction, sound economical development, etc. Fundamentally, I am interested in gathering empirical data that evaluates the effectiveness of current and emerging techniques in software development. Currently, my research is geared toward understanding and evaluating the engineering practices and management techniques advocated by proponents of AgileSoftwareDevelopment.

CategoryHomePage