Outline

1. Outline • Introduction: • What is Agile development? • The Potential Benefits of Agile Development • Research questions • Literatures Review • Conclusion • References

2. What is Agile development? Agile development has four basic values: • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools • Working software over comprehensive documentation • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation • Responding to change over following a plan (Fowler and Highsmith, 2001)

3. The Potential Benefits of Agile Development • Improved Customer Satisfaction • Improved Developer/Employee Satisfaction • Greater Productivity • Faster Return on Investment • Higher Quality Software (Dyba and Dingsoyr, 2008)

4. Is Agile Right for Your Organization? Questions: • What are the challenges associated with adopting agile development practices? • How can an organization address these challenges successfully?

5. Challenges of Agile Adoption • Emphasize is on the survey done by Vijayasarathy and Turk (2008) on “Problems/Challenges in the Adoption and Use of Agile Processes and Methods” • 98 responses from software professionals who have an average of 15.5 years of experience with software development and 3.9 years of agile experience

6. Challenges of Agile Adoption Extent of Problem Chart : Problems/Challenges in the Adoption and Use of Agile Processes and Methods (on scale of 7 i.e. most challenging) Source : Vijayasarathy and Turk (2008) pg. 5

7. Challenges of Agile Adoption • Organizational Resistance: • Agile works best only in an environment where the team is collocated, so the work environment might need to be changed • The team requires a high amount of freedom and authority, which can conflict with traditional decision hierarchies • Members of the team should be very capable, which can create a perception of favoritism or exclusion toward the team

8. Challenges of Agile Adoption • Management Apathy • Agile development can affect the power structure (loss of titles) within an organization because it spreads out the decision-making authority (Willams and Cockburn, 2003, p. 41) • Senior managers with clear understanding of Scrum principles supported their teams’ use of Scrum better; the worst time to train managers about Scrum was when something went wrongand Scrum looked like it was the problem or barrier (Benefield, 2008, p. 4).

9. Challenges of Agile Adoption • Inadequate Training • Producing the product combined with the task of learning agile may become overwhelming (Hodgettts, 2004) • Yahoo’s budgetary cycle change in 2005 caused a shortfall where they tried widespread agile adoption to reduce short-term costs. The demand for training outstripped the resources, and the untrained teams developed “pseudo-scrum” practices with negative effects that were problematic in the long-term (Benefield, 2008)

10. Challenges of Agile Adoption • Lack of Peer Support • People have to work in groups and that might be a problem because all the group members would not like agile system • “Had to deal with the reality that not everyone is willing or able to change and that, ultimately, the new environment may not be a good fit for them anymore” (Benefield, 2008, p. 9) • “Some proportion of the development community has no interest in change, however, which may impose an inevitable limit to the penetration of agile techniques” (Willams and Cockburn, 2003, p. 41)

11. Challenges of Agile Adoption • Lack of Formal Guidelines •  Agile approaches require significant greater discipline on the part of practitioners compared with traditional approaches(Ambler, 2009) • The purpose of agile development is to allow the flexibility to respond to change, so practices are not rigorously defined • Lack of formal guidelines could lead to the wrong system development procedure • “It is very challenging to deliver incremental products without good engineering discipline” (Benefield, 2008)

12. Challenges of Agile Adoption • Minimal Rewards for Using Agile Techniques • Agile is well suited in environment where requirements are continuously changing like in internet development • Agile is not as good for projects where the scope is fixed, like operating systems • Agile is not a good match for systems where rigorous standards of requirements or quality must be assured, such as life-critical systems • Sometime drawbacks would outscore benefits of using agile

13. Challenges of Agile Adoption • Increased Risk of Project Failure • Making any change in a stable development methodology increases the chances of project failure • Agile development is significantly different from traditional practices, and the learning curve makes the risk even higher • Agile can succeed fast. either way this can cause budgeting problems and all the corporate politics that goes along with this

14. Other challenges • Unpredictability • Most organizations tend to have fixed price project contracts • Stakeholders want to impose financial constraints over the project team • Agile methodology couldn’t satisfy – cost, scope & quality – with fixed price contracts • Unpredictability arises when we can’t determine the amount of functionality that we could deliver for a fixed amount of money

15. Addressing the challenges Successful Agile Adopters do these things: • Value feedback and learning • Promote social interaction in the organization • Project managers act as facilitators • Have a management style of leadership and collaboration (Strode, Huff, and Tretiakov, 2009)

16. Addressing the challenges (contd.) Successful Agile Adopters do these things: • Value teamwork, flexibility and participation • Empower people • Results-oriented • Entrepreneurial, innovative, and risk-taking leadership • Loyalty , mutual trust and commitment among employees (Hodgetts, 2004)

17. Other Adoption Guidance • Investment in training for the team and managers is critical • Target a project where adoption makes sense, and motivation for it to succeed exists • Adopt agile practices gradually instead of attempting wholesale adoption • Use the lessons learned on early projects to drive future adoption efforts (Hodgetts, 2004)

18. Conclusion • An Agile enterprise is prepared to face challenges, mitigating the risks and realizing the opportunities. • Need to address these challenges before going for the adaptation in the organization • Organization culture has grown up over a long period of time and is based on the challenges an organization faces. • Management, employees, policy and budget should be conducive to successfully adopt an agile system

19. References Benefield, Gabrielle (2008). Rolling out Agile in a Large Enterprise. Proceedings of the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Pg 1-10 Flower, Martin and Highsmith, Jim (2001).The Agile Manifesto. Software Development. Retrieved fromhttp://andrey.hristov.com/fht-stuttgart/The_Agile_Manifesto_SDMagazine.pdf Dyba, Tore and Dingsøyr, Torgeir (2008). Empirical studies of agile software development: A systematic review. Elsevier B.V. Retrieved from www.ScienceDirect.com. Pg. 834-842 Williams, Laurie and Cockburn, Alistair (2003).Agile Software Development: It’s about Feedback and Change. IEEE Computer Society . Pg-39.42 Hodgetts, Paul (2004). Refactoring the Development Process: Experiences with the Incremental Adoption of Agile Practices. IEEE Computer Society Strode, D.E., Huff, S.L., and Tretiakov, A. (2009). The Impact of Organizational Culture on Agile Method Use. IEEE Computer Society. Pg 1-9 Vijayasarathy, L.R. and Turk, Dan (2008). Agile Software Development: A Survey of Early Adopters. Journal of Information Technology Management. Volume XIX, Number2.Pg1-8 Amber, Scott W. (2009).Adopting Evolutionary/Agile Database Techniques.Retrieved November 11, 2009, from Agiledata Web site: http://www.agiledata.org/essays/adopting.html

20. Thank you!!! 