Adopting agile software development practices: success factors, changes required, and challenges

Abstract

Agile software development is an emerging approach in software engineering, initially proposed and promoted by a group of seventeen software professionals who practice a set of lightweight methods, and share a common set of values of software development. They consolidated their thoughts, and defined these methods as agile. The approaches are based on experiences, and best practices from the past by the above-mentioned group of seventeen software professionals. As an emerging approach of this century, agile software development has undergone limited number of empirical studies. In this Thesis, we advance the state-of-the-art of the research in this area by conducting survey-based ex-post-facto empirical (quantitative) studies by identifying the success factors from the perspective of software practitioners in agile software development projects, determining the key changes traditional projects have to undergo to adopt agile practices in their projects, and the challenges/risks they have to undergo for transition. We describe theoretical frameworks we have developed to address our research questions, the hypotheses we have conjectured, the research methodology, the data analysis techniques we have used, and the results we have obtained from the data analysis. The study was conducted using a survey-based methodology consisting of respondents who practice agile software development methodologies and who have experience practicing plan-driven software development in the past. The study indicates that nine of the fourteen hypothesized factors have statistically significant relationship with success. It also suggests a ranked list of changes required and challenges involved in adopting agile software development methodologies by projects practicing plan-driven software development.