Agile Software Development in Large Organizations

I n recent years, the use of, interest in, and controversies surrounding agile methods have all increased dramatically—as has anecdotal evidence for agile methods’ effectiveness in certain environments and for specific project types. Exactly in which environments and under what conditions agile methods work remains unclear, however. A development team at Motorola, for example, noted that, “a plethora of subjective evidence exists to support the use of agile development methods on non-life-critical software projects.”1 Yet the team found no information about using the approach for its particular development focus: mission-critical software products. This shows the need for more evidence that a new technology works in a certain context before developers promote and deploy it on a larger scale. Although most organizations have similar needs, 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—ABB, DaimlerChrysler, Motorola, and Nokia—and focus on the following areas: