The Agile Research Penultimatum

Agile software development is a widely used and successful methodology for organizing and managing software product development in an industry setting. For academic research projects in Computer Science, the development of software is often a major component and the use of agile methods may be appropriate. The fundamental difference in how software engineering is performed in an academic research setting as compared with that of industry, however, means that a strict application of agile approaches may not be ideal. In this paper, we adapt the Agile Manifesto to the needs of an academic research project. Four case studies are presented, two from industry, one from academia, and one from an industry-academia collaborative project to support the adaptations, motivating a set of proposed agile research policies called the Agile Research Penultimatum.