Adopting Agile Practices in Teams with No Direct Programming Responsibility – A Case Study

Abstract

To respond to the need for flexibility in reacting to customer needs, the agile practices have been introduced in the software development organizations. In order to get full benefit of agile, it is proposed that the agile and lean practices should be adopted organization wide. Agile practices are mainly used by programmers, but in large companies, there can be different work roles and tasks which do not directly include programming of the product but are supporting the software development in the system level, such as system level testing and testing environment maintenance. In this study, the goal was to provide information on the progress of agile transformation in teams with no direct programming responsibility in a large-scale, distributed software development organization. A survey was done to collect data during the first year of agile adoption about agile practices utilisation within three different teams: the developers, the system level testers and people in test laboratory support. The results show that certain agile practices were adopted in the teams with no direct programming responsibility, and there were differences between the teams.