International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management

International Journal of Quality & Reliability ManagementIdentifying some critical changes required in adopting agile practices in traditional
software development projects
Subhas Chandra Misra Vinod Kumar Uma Kumar
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To cite this document:Subhas Chandra Misra Vinod Kumar Uma Kumar, (2010),"Identifying some critical changes required inadopting agile practices in traditional software development projects", International Journal of Quality &Reliability Management, Vol. 27 Iss 4 pp. 451 - 474
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Identifying some critical changesrequired in adopting agile
practices in traditional software
development projectsSubhas Chandra MisraIndian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India and
Vinod Kumar and Uma KumarCarleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
Purpose – Agile softwaredevelopment(ASD)is currently an emerging approach in software
engineering forimproving quality,initially advocated by a group of17 software professionals
who practicea set of “lightweight”methods,and share a common setof values ofsoftware
development.Owing to the attractive claims of successes of the ASD approach,many traditional
projects,which used to practice plan-driven software development,are gradually transitioning
into ASD-based development.This paperseeksto reportthe resultsfrom a survey-based
ex-post-factostudy aimedat determiningthe relativeimportance,if any, of the changes
traditional plan-driven software development projects have to undergo to adopt ASD practices.
Design/methodology/approach – Thestudy wasconducted using a web-based survey with
ASD practitioners who had experience of practicing plan-driven software development in the past.
ASD practitioners from a wide range ofindustrialsectors participated in the study.Similarly,
the study is notrestricted to any specific organisation/projectsize,culture,or nationality – the
respondents were widely geographically distributed across continents.
Findings – The study received 241 responses, of which 165 were usable. The study did not reveal any
substantialdifferencein importanceof thefour classesof changeshypothesised – changesin
culture,changes in managementstyle,changes in knowledge managementstrategy and changes
in development processes. The authors believe that this is an important finding because it is indicative of
notisolating one class of changes from another in practicaltransition exercises.However,another
noteworthy observation wasthat transitioning from heavily process-centricto short,iterative,
test-driven,and people-centric development was considered by the largest percentage (roughly 77 per
cent) of respondents to be very important.The open-ended questions in the study also revealed three
additionalclasses of changes:changes in personalcharacteristics,changes in customer attitude,and
changes in knowledge and education of stakeholders.
Originality/value – In this work an attempt was made to gain an understanding of the relative
importance of the different critical changes that would be helpful to a project manager who is involved
in the transition from traditionalplan-driven software developmentpractices to agile software
development practices.
Keywords Software engineering, Change management
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
ASD (Abrahamson et al., 2002; Cockburn, 2001, 2002a, b; Fowler and Highsmith, 2001;
Highsmith,2004;Fowler,2002;Larman,2004;Schwaber and Beedle,2002;Schwaber,
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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Adopting agile
practices
451
Received May 2009
Revised October 2009
Accepted October 2009
International Journal of Quality &
Reliability Management
Vol.27 No.4,2010
pp.451-474
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0265-671X
DOI 10.1108/02656711011035147
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2004) is currently an emerging software development approach, constituting of a set of
principles,initially advocated by a group of17 software practitioners[1],and now
practiced by many software professionals.The principles they advocated,leading to
the emergence ofthe ASD philosophy,are based on previous success and failure
experiences with many software developmentprojects regarding whatworks and
whatdoesnot in practice.Each of thesepractitionershad theirown different
philosophies about how they approached software development. However,all of them
advocated some common principles. These principles underlie the philosophy of ASD.
In the case of traditional software development projects,prior to the birth of the ASD
paradigm,were morefocusedon followingwell-definedplans and detailed
documentations.In February 2001,the advocatesof the ASD philosophy met
together, and prepared the Manifesto for ASD, which is stated below (Cockburn, 2001,
2002a,b; Fowler and Highsmith,2001;Fowler,2002;Schwaber and Beedle,2002;
Schwaber,2004).
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping
others do it.Through this work we have come to value:
. individuals and interactions over processes and tools;
. working software over comprehensive documentation;
. customer collaboration over contract negotiation;and
. responding to change over following a plan.
That is,while there is value in the items on the right,we value the items on the left
more (Agile Manifesto).
Following 2001, many other software practitioners were inspired by the philosophy
behind ASD.It is pertinent to mention that prior to the birth of the ASD paradigm,
differentpractitioners used to follow some ofthe practices suggested by the ASD
paradigm in their software development projects.However,it is only after 2001 that
these set of practices were formalised and were together coined the term “agile”.
The overall goalof this work was to improve the understanding of the emerging
ASD approach by attempting to address the following question:
What are the important changes required for adopting ASD practices in projects practicing
traditional plan-driven software development? Can we rank them according to their levels of
importance?[2]
We conducted a moderately large-scale[3]empiricalstudy involving 241 returned
survey questionnaires.While the existing articles available in the literature report
experientialinformation,anecdotalinformation and empiricalresults on different
aspects, there is no literature available,to the best of our knowledge, that use surveys
to attempt to identify the relative importance of the changes required in the same
manner that we did.Important pieces of related existing literature are presented in
sections2 and 3. The feedback wereceived whileconducting thesurvey was
overwhelming. Many of the respondents, who are also experts in this area, have shown
interest in the work and its results.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. In section 2, we review the background
and motivation of this work.In section 3,we describe the various changes required
based on intuition and existing literature.In section 4,we describe ourresearch
methodology.In section 5 we describe the results ofthe analysis ofthe data we
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obtained from the survey we conducted. In section 6, we discuss the research findings
from different perspectives.Finally,in section 7 we conclude the paper and provide
some directions for future research.
2. Motivation and background
The primary motivation behind this work is to attempt to identify some of the changes
that should be prioritised by organisations who are transitionalto agile.With this
motivation ofattempting to help projectmanagers involved in such transitioning
activities, we conducted a survey-based empirical study. Before elaborating our work,
for the sake of maintaining the continuity of our discussions,we articulate below,in
short, some of the other empirically-based research works related to that were done in
the past. However, the list of references related to previous empirical studies should not
be construed to be exhaustive.
Detailed discussions on some of the empirical studies relating to different aspects
and perspectives of ASD projects exist in Abrahamson and Koskela (2004),Arisholm
et al.(2007),Bahetiet al.(2002),Baskerville et al.(2003),Ceschiet al.(2005),Chong
(2005),Dagnino etal.(2004),Dalcher etal.(2005),Jokela and Abrahamsson (2004),
Karlstroem and Runeson (2005),Layman et al.(2004),Macias et al.(2003),Mann and
Maurer (2005),Mannaro etal.(2004),Melnik and Maurer (2002),Middleton (2001),
Reifer (2002),Robinson and Sharp (2004),Rumpe and Schroder (2002),Sharp and
Robinson (2004), Shine Technologies (2003), Sillitti et al. (2005), Salo and Abrahamsson
(2008),Wellington et al.(2005),Misra et al.(2009) and Young et al.(2005).Apart from
the above, as mentioned in footnote 2, recent surveys on ASD by VersionOne and Scott
Ambler also exist. However, none of them are directly related to identifying the critical
changes required.
In a recent work,Dyba ̊and Dingsøyr (2008) published an excellent work in which
they systematically reviewed all the empirical studies,including the above,that have
been conducted tillrecently.However,none of these works is extremely similar in
nature and scope with the study reported in this paper.Therefore,in order to avoid
redundancy of discussions in the literature and to present our work contextually and
briefly,we avoid presenting a review of allthe above papers.Interested readers are
referred to Dyba ̊ and Dingsøyr(2008)to geta detailed overview ofthe studies
presented in the works mentioned in the last paragraph.Instead,we articulate below,
in short,only a selection of those works.
Reifer (2002) is one of the first articles reporting survey results on agile methods.
Although the nature of the survey was very simple,using only a small data space,it
was important because it captured various experiences of ASD practitioners in various
industry types.Reiffer found thatfive firms reported thattheir defectrates from
product were at par with their other projects.
Baheti et al.(2002) conducted empirical studies on distributed pair programming.
They gathered empirical data in favour of pair programming in distributed teams,a
very important issue in the current world of off shoring and outsourcing of IT business
processes. Their study resulted in the creation of a special environment for distributed
programming using dual screen projectors,and hypermedia-enhanced video streams.
Rumpe and Schroder (2002)conducted a survey on extreme programming (XP)
projects.They found out that the continuous presence of customers was important in
XP projects. They also found out that although there are a plenty of problems in XP’s
success,it was found to be superior to some oftraditionalsoftware development
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approaches.However,their survey had few limitations in terms of size,application
domains,and seeded biases.They called for further surveys on XP.
Kalermo and Rissanen (2002) used an empirical case study in the context of agile
in-house software development in corporate venturing to find results supporting the
principlesand valuesof theAgile Manifesto.Their study confirmed thattacit
knowledge,motivation ofemployees,and theirskills and knowledgelevelsare
important in ASD.
Shine Technologies (2003) conducted a simple survey of the global experiences with
ASD.They found that companies that follow agile practices have lower costs,better
productivity,better quality,and better business satisfaction.
Abrahamson and Koskela (2004)performed a controlled case study on XP in
practicalsettings.In their study,they gotfour software engineers to implementa
web-based system of 7,698 lines of code over a period of 820 hours in eight weeks. They
obtained favourable results in support of the usefulness of XP. It may be noted that all
of these studies are limited in their magnitude and exhaustiveness of investigation.
Arisholm et al. (2007) conducted another controlled case study to evaluate different
aspects of pair programming. The subjects they chose were required to perform several
change tasks using professional Java tools on two Java-based systems. Their study did
not find evidence that pair programming reduces time to resolve tasks correctly.The
readers may refer to the other detailed findings from their study.
Salo and Abrahamsson (2008)reported another interesting study in which they
attempted to gain an understanding ofthe actualuse and usefulness ofextreme
programming and Scrum in embedded systemsindustries.They surveyed 13
European organisationsand found outthatagilemethodshavepenetrated the
embedded systems industries and thatthe increase in adoption ofagile practices
increased the appreciation for such practices in such organisations.
Jokela and Abrahamsson (2004)attempted to study therelationship between
usability engineering and extreme programming.They investigated in a project the
extent to which extreme programming guides the development of usable software.
Their findings reveal that extreme programming is poor in explicitly attending to the
usability of software.
Karlstroem and Runeson (2005)reported the results of study of the feasibility of
using agile methods in traditional stage-gate project management environments. Their
findings show that despite there are possibilities of some initial management resistance
of such an attempt, it is definitely possible to use agile methods in such environments.
Wellington et al.(2005)performed yet another study in which they reported the
comparison of student experiences with both plan-driven and agile methods.They
measured team cohesion and students’attachments to projects throughout.They also
monitored the applications that were developed by the different teams. They found out
that all the teams developed almost the same amount of functionality,the XP team’s
code had better metrics. The teams that used the traditional process had to write more
code to implement the same functionality.
For reasons cited in the earlier part of this section, without discussing the previous
distantly related works any further,we now summarise the motivations behind our
work and our contributions.Let us assume that a software practitioner who used to
practice plan-driven software development wants to adopt ASD practices in a project
that is about to start.He/she would be interested to know – what are the important
changes to be focused on to adopt ASD practices? There are potentially many changes
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