Towards a theoretical foundation for agile development

Abstract

Is it not the idea and the vision of corporates dealing in software development to create and deliver good and great software? The answer could be in affirmative. And towards this larger end of delivering high quality software and ensuring customer satisfaction, promulgated explicitly or imbibed implicitly, there has been sustained efforts towards creating and adopting new ways, new models and methods of software development. As we know, in 2001, some stalwarts and experts in various software development methods congregated in Snowbird, Utah to sign what is known as the ‘agile manifesto’. Much water has flown since then across the Ganges and the Thames. The present paper is a theoretical reflection on the agile development paradigm and in the process the paper tries to propose a theoretical foundation to this fertile field, taking a system's perspective; including the system-of-systems understanding. The theoretical foundation that we present in the paper is built on the ideas relating to change as in Goldratt's Thinking Processes of the theory of constraints. For theoretical evidence, the paper discusses agile development principles and practices and then maps the agile principles to the elements of the thinking processes. We argue that since agile development is all about customer centricity, customer proximity with respect to his needs and change requirements, feedback and change in general; the theoretical underpinnings for agile development stay hidden in the body of knowledge relating to ‘cybernetics of cybernetics’ and the thinking processes of the theory of constraints. However, in the present paper, the focus remains to find the theoretical foundation to agile development through the change challenges and dynamics as expounded by Kotter and the thinking processes; as explained in the paper.