Standards compliance helps value creation in agile projects

Abstract

Compliance with standards or levels in maturity models and agile approaches are two radically different ways to address and achieve software quality. There is a mixed understanding of the possibility for their co-existence within an organization. Outside of the dogmatic debate regarding their co-existence, however, voices have been raised recently to recognize that both approaches have their merits, and perhaps, can be combined. This paper presents the results of an interview-based exploratory case study on the practices that an agile-by-design organization has put in place in order to profit from the opportunities that compliance to a quality standard can offer in respect to value creation for clients. Our conclusions are (i) that being compliant with a standard helps an agile company achieve client satisfaction, improved product quality and waste reduction; and (ii) that standards compliance does not necessarily impose significant changes on the agile process of an organization. Implication for practice is twofold: our results indicate (1) that agile organizations should strive for becoming more mature as this brings additional benefits, and (2) that for organizations to get standards-compliant there is a need of guidelines to direct them in complementing their agile processes with standards-compliant practices.