When individual teams in mechatronic organizations attempt to adopt agile software practices, these practices tend to only affect modules or sub-systems. The short iterations on team level do not lead to short lead-times in launching new or updated products since the overall R&D approach on an organization level is still governed by an overall stage gate or single cycle V-model. This paper iden...

Agile Software Development Process (ASDP) has been adopted by many software industries. There exist various methods based on ASDP. Agile methods (AMs) are used mostly in small and low critical projects due to lack of generalized practices. Limited applicability of AMs in distributed environment, life critical system, contract projects and large complex application generated the strong need of g...

While every IT professional knows from experience that handling change is much harder and more expensive than building IT systems from scratch, only little scientific attention has been paid to prepare for change. This issue is of great importance since usually 80-90% of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of IT systems are maintenance costs. In our networked society changes may result from diffe...

L.L.Bean is a large retail organization whose development processes must be agile in order to allow rapid enhancement and maintenance of its technology infrastructure. Over the past seven years L.L.Bean’s Java software code-base had become more difficult to evolve. A corporate-wide effort was launched to identify and develop new approaches to software development that would enable ongoing agili...

This experience report describes our efforts to introduce agile development techniques incrementally into our customer’s organization in the National Cancer Institute and develop a partnering relationship in the process. The report addresses the steps we have taken not only to deploy the practices, but also to gain customer support for them. It addresses variations we have used to adapt to our ...

Corporate software development faces very demanding challenges, especially concerning the user interface of a software system. Collaborative design with stakeholders demands informal modeling methods that everybody can understand and apply. But using traditional, paper-based methods to gather and document requirements, an IT organization often experiences frustrating communication issues betwee...

Social traps are situations within which individuals or groups face the prospect of adopting seemingly beneficial behaviors that have negative consequences over time or for a larger collective (Platt, 1973). While on the one hand, the Agile manifesto has been welcomed by many in the software developer community who often perceived formal processes as management generated inefficiency that gets ...

Since the 2001 publication of the Agile Manifesto, agile information systems development (ISD) methods have enjoyed increasing popularity. Extant research has highlighted critical challenges and key benefits associated with agile methods. Notwithstanding, the contribution of the actions performed by actors involved in an ISD project toward the achievement of agility remains unclear. This issue ...

While Agile methods were originally introduced for small, tightly coupled teams, leaner ways of working are becoming a practical method to run entire enterprises. As the emphasis of user experience work has inherently been on the early phases before starting the development, it also needs to be adapted to the Agile way of working. To improve the current practices in Agile user experience work, ...

This study focuses on the role the customer plays in the adoption and consolidation of Agile practices in software development firms. We considered two main aspects: 1) the degree of collaboration between customers and suppliers; 2) the degree of active participation of the customer in software development processes. We argue that both these factors affect the level of Agility of an organizatio...