Introducing an Agile Process to an Organization

S ince the publication of Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained, agile processes have grown increasingly popular. Agile processes allow for changing requirements throughout the development cycle and stress collaboration between software developers and customers and early product delivery. The “Agile Manifesto” establishes a common framework for these processes: 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. The processes most commonly considered agile include Extreme Programming (XP), Lean Development, Crystal, and Scrum. In Scrum, projects progress in a series of monthlong iterations called sprints. Development teams meet with the client, or product owner, before each sprint to prioritize the work to be done and select the tasks the team can complete in the upcoming sprint. During the sprint, the team stays on track by holding brief daily meetings. At the end of each sprint, the team delivers a potentially shippable product increment. Scrum is ideally suited for projects with rapidly changing or highly emergent requirements such as Web projects or product development for new markets. Over the past four years, we have introduced Scrum to seven organizations in four states. Some of the projects were complex and involved distributed teams. Others were straightforward and involved small, colocated teams. However, even the simple projects reached across many departments or functional areas. A failure to sell the process change to any one area can negatively impact the project’s outcome. Through trial and error, we have discovered several approaches for successfully introducing agile processes to organizations.