Study to Delimit the Factors That Contribute to the Adoption of an Agile Methodology

Abstract

Agile methodologies are increasingly being adopted by companies. The research on adopting an agile approach is based on the elements required for its implementation. On the other hand, a quantitative study on the challenges of adopting an agile approach is interesting. The main objective of this work is to present the results of a study on the factors that have a significant relationship with the adoption of an agile approach over a traditional one by work teams in software development companies. With this objective, a systematic analysis of works that mention this transition was carried out, to extract and synthesize the existing challenges. These challenges were used to outline a conceptual framework to evaluate the connection between the challenges that work teams have to suffer from the linear relationship with the adoption of an agile approach. Next, a construct was used to test and evaluate the factors that are part of the proposed framework. The findings indicate that what leads to the decision the transition from the traditional approach to agile is the quality, complexity, and management of iterations where the work is visible to the users; factors that have a significant linear relationship with the adoption of an agile approach. We recommend that organizations consider these findings during their adoption phase of any agile methodology over a traditional one.