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New disciplines are usually based on intuitions of pioneers who have been able to scavenge through anecdotes, practices, and issues to establish a corpus of knowledge able to justify facts and to support the identification and the explanation of new phenomena.The original corpus of knowledge may not understand correctly the essence of a discipline, but still can be very important for the human life. Take as an example the Aristotelian physics. It was based on assumptions that turned out to be completely wrong. Still, people used it to build houses, to navigate with ships, to understand the dynamics of fluids. Even more, still today people use some of the terms and the practices coming from the Aristotelian physics, for instance in astronomy.However, new disciplines are often subjects to fads. At the beginning it is difficult to distinguish what is true science from what is the result of witchcraft. The lack of a sound mathematical basis is a major concern.Software engineering is indeed a new discipline built on the basis of the intuition, the ingenuity, the genius, and the hard work of a few pioneers. Parallel to such outstanding work there has been several fads. Needless to say, it has always difficult to distinguish fads from solid methods and to determine the scope of applicability of the proposed solid methods.Quantitative software engineering (also referred to as Empirical Software Engineering) deals with the quantitative assessment of software engineering practices. It is intended to be a way to solidly assess whether a new method is solidly grounded or it is just a new fad. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of a few pioneers, namely Victor Basili and Barry Boehm (in strict alphabetical order), the discipline has now grown even if it seriously lack the absence of widely accepted corpus, which could simplify its systematic adoption in evaluating every single methodology that is proposed, as it already happens in other "soft" disciplines, such as education, psychology, etc.One of the new methods proposed have been the so-called Agile Methodologies. They look very reasonable, supporters claim the tremendous added value that Agile Methodologies produce. However, the question is up in the air: "Are they just a new fad?"The works presented in this collection try to provide a rigorous answer to this question applying the principle of quantitative software engineering. Needless to say, this is just one of the many collections of works that are needed to provide a solid answer to the question above.
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