Agile methods tailoring – A systematic literature review

Abstract

Background: The software development industry has been adopting agile methods instead of traditional software development methods because they are more flexible and can bring benefits such as handling requirements changes, productivity gains and business alignment. Objective: This study seeks to evaluate, synthesize, and present aspects of research on agile methods tailoring including the method tailoring approaches adopted and the criteria used for agile practice selection. Method: The method adopted was a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on studies published from 2002 to 2014. Results: 56 out of 783 papers have been identified as describing agile method tailoring approaches. These studies have been identified as case studies regarding the empirical research, as solution proposals regarding the research type, and as evaluation studies regarding the research validation type. Most of the papers used method engineering to implement tailoring and were not specific to any agile method on their scope. Conclusion: Most of agile methods tailoring research papers proposed or improved a technique, were implemented as case studies analyzing one case in details and validated their findings using evaluation. Method engineering was the base for tailoring, the approaches are independent of agile method and the main criteria used are internal environment and objectives variables.