Impediments in Agile Software Development: An Empirical Investigation

In this paper, we report on a case study on development impediments encountered in the early phase of a transformation to agile methods in a software development organization. Drawing from literature and anecdotal evidence, it was assumed that the majority of the impediments were related to software testing. To investigate this, we performed a case study seeking qualitative and quantitative evidence from task boards, interviews, and observations. Our analysis indicates that the major challenge in the transformation undertaken by the studied organization was coordination and communication in the large, and that testing was the major challenge only when the unit of analysis was restricted to the teams in the department.