https://it323.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/science9.pdf

A survey study of critical success factors in agile software projects

Awareness and use of agile methods has grown rapidly among the information systems development (ISD) community in recent years. Like most previous methods, the development and promotion of these methods have been almost entirely driven by practitioners and consultants, with little participation from the research community during the early stages of evolution. While these methods are now the focus of more and more research efforts, most studies are still based on XP, Scrum, and other industry-driven foundations, with little or no conceptual studies of ISD agility in existence. As a result, this study proposes that there are a number of significant conceptual shortcomings with agile methods and the associated literature in its current state, including a lack of clarity, theoretical glue, parsimony, limited applicability, and naivety regarding the evolution of the concept of agility in fields outside systems development. Furthermore, this has significant implications for practitioners, rendering agile method comparison and many other activities very difficult, especially in instances such as distributed development and large teams that are not conducive to many of the commercial agile methods. This study develops a definition and formative taxonomy of agility in an ISD context, based on a structured literature review of agility across a number of disciplines, including manufacturing and management where the concept originated, matured, and has been applied and tested thoroughly over time. The application of the texonomy in practice is then demonstrated through a series of thought trials conducted in a large multinational organization. The intention is that the definition and taxonomy can then be used as a starting point to study ISD method agility regardless of whether the method is XP or Scrum, agile or traditional, complete or fragmented, out-of-the-box or in-house, used as is or tailored to suit the project context.

https://ulir.ul.ie/bitstream/handle/10344/574/L%201.pdf;sequence=2

Agility from First Principles: Reconstructing the Concept of Agility in Information Systems Development

https://research.aalto.fi/files/11744469/1_s2.0_S0164121216300826_main.pdf

Challenges and success factors for large-scale agile transformations

Agile software development practices such as eXtreme Programming (XP) and SCRUM have increasingly been adopted to respond to the challenges of volatile business environments, where the markets and technologies evolve rapidly and present the unexpected. In spite of the encouraging results so far, little is known about how agile practices affect communication. This article presents the results from a study which examined the impact of XP and SCRUM practices on communication within software development teams and within the focal organization. The research was carried out as a case study in F-Secure where two agile software development projects were compared from the communication perspective. The goal of the study is to increase the understanding of communication in the context of agile software development: internally among the developers and project leaders and in the interface between the development team and stakeholders (i.e. customers, testers, other development teams). The study shows that agile practices improve both informal and formal communication. However, it further indicates that, in larger development situations involving multiple external stakeholders, a mismatch of adequate communication mechanisms can sometimes even hinder the communication. The study highlights the fact that hurdles and improvements in the communication process can both affect the feature requirements and task subtask dependencies as described in coordination theory. While the use of SCRUM and some XP practices facilitate team and organizational communication of the dependencies between product features and working tasks, the use of agile practices requires that the team and organization use also additional plan-driven practices to ensure the efficiency of external communication between all the actors of software development.

/pdf/the-impact-of-agile-practices-on-communication-in-software-1n4vqdcw44.pdf

The impact of agile practices on communication in software development

Agile systems development methods emerged as a response to the inability of previous plan-driven approaches to handle rapidly changing environments (Highsmith, 2002). Originating from the so-called...

/pdf/lots-done-more-to-do-the-current-state-of-agile-systems-4ld7emypil.pdf

'Lots Done, More To Do': the Current State of Agile Systems Development Research

The need to see compelling evidence before adopting new methods looms greater in large organizations because of their complexity and the need to integrate new technologies and processes with existing ones. To further evaluate agile methods and their underlying software development practices, several Software Experience Center (SEC) member companies initiated a series of activities to discover if agile practices match their organizations' needs. Although each organization evaluated agile methods according to its specific needs, here we attempt to generalize their findings by analyzing some of their common experiences in the particular context of large organizations with well-established structures and processes. We base this analysis on experience collected and shared among four SEC members namely ABB, DaimlerChrysler, Motorola, and Nokia.

/pdf/agile-software-development-in-large-organizations-1jsxj15l5q.pdf

A. Dagnino

Papers

Agile software development in large organizations