Organisational changes in migration to agile development strategies

A review of:

Challenges of migrating to agile methodologies

Sridhar Nerur, Radha Kanta Mahapatra, George Mangalaraj in Communications of the ACM, 2005, Vol 48 issue 5, pp 72 – 78

Introduction

Agile development methodologies becoming popular

Migration to agile development has been covered from developer point of view

Organisations need to manage this change

What are agile methodologies?

Cope with changing requirements Short iterations Few artefacts TDD No central control Feature-led, not task-led

Why agile methodologies?

Development is a time-consuming process, and requirements change over time

Organisations need to adapt to change Handle inaccurate requirements gracefully Business-oriented

Goals

Present impact of agile methods on the structure of an organisation

Compare traditional and agile methods from organisational viewpoint

Change in management style

Traditional methods use command and control

Agile methods favour a collaborative environment

No central management Minimal artefacts showing current state

Power shift

Lack of central control removes power from managers

Tacit knowledge is not transparent Critical decisions made by development

team

Elitist culture

Traditional methods don’t compare well Agile development needs good staff Teams left with traditional methods feel left

out

Harder decision making

Decision environment is diverse Every stakeholder has a different agenda No centralised control

Cooperative customers

Agile development includes on-site customer

Opportunity to clarify requirements Rapid feedback cycle Expensive investment!

C.R.A.C.K. customers

Collaborative Representative Authorised Committed Knowledgeable Picky list of requirements!

Cost of changes

All change requires costs Planning Procedures Structures Skills Communication methods

New tools

Agile technology favours OO Potential cost of new development

platform Developmers need to acquire new

language

New procedures

Agile tech recommends procedures that may not be in place

Unit testing Version control Deployment Refactoring

Current literature

Relies on existing work Mainly a collation Older literature in the field exists Managerial viewpoint is fairly unexplored

Possible extensions

Case studies Specific identification of pitfalls Metrics Examining general effect of organisational

change

Conclusions

Migrating to agile methodologies is costly Both developers and managers need to

plan change Culture shift may occur Opportunities for further investigation