Abstract
Organizations are increasingly adopting Agile frameworks for their internal software development. Cost reduction, rapid deployment, requirements and mental model alignment are typical reasons for an Agile transformation. This article presents an in-depth field study of a large-scale Agile transformation in a mission-critical environment, where stakeholders' commitment was a critical success factor. The goal of such a transformation was to implement mission-oriented features, reducing costs and time to operate in critical scenarios. The project lasted several years and involved over 40 professionals. We report how a hierarchical and plan-driven organization exploited Agile methods to develop a Command & Control (C2) system. Accordingly, we first abstract our experience, inducing a success model of general use for other comparable organizations by performing a post-mortem study. The goal of the inductive research process was to identify critical success factors and their relations. Finally, we validated and generalized our model through Partial Least Squares - Structural Equation Modelling, surveying 200 software engineers involved in similar projects. We conclude the article with data-driven recommendations concerning the management of Agile projects.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 52 |
| Journal | Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Number of pages | 46 |
| ISSN | 1049-331X |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jul 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was partially supported by the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council (ISTC-CNR); the Italian Inter-University Consortium for Informatics (CINI); and the Science Foundation Ireland grant 13/RC/2094 & 15/SIRG/3293 and co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund through the Southern & Eastern Regional Operational Programme to Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre (www.lero.ie). Author’s address: D. Russo, Aalborg University, Department of Computer Science, Selma Lagerlofs Vej 300, Aalborg East, 9220, Denmark; email: [email protected].
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. 1049-331X/2021/07-ART52 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3464938
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Keywords
- Agile
- ethnography
- grounded theory
- mixed methods research
- multivariate analysis
- partial least squares
- structural equation modeling