Agile methods, organizational culture and agility: some insights
Lakshminarayana Kompella · 2014
Software development depends on various factors and organizational culture is one of them. Recently agile software development, with its emphasis on agility, has received much attention. Research so far has focused on the constructs that define agility and also identified the reasons that limit teams from exhibiting all the constructs of agile software development. This lead to re-defining agility by using economic, quality, simplicity and the relationship with the environment it operates on. One of the factors that contribute to relationship with environment is organizational culture. Though relationship of organizational culture and software methods is not new, analyzing the relationship further in the new defined definition of agility can provide deep insights into software development. In this paper a qualitative research method of multiple case-studies consisting of 3 releases of one product development team was selected. Data was collected using participant-observation method. Research findings have identified some useful insights that could provide researchers and practitioners to develop software development life-cycle that incorporates existing agile methods and uses diverse set of methods to resolve issues including organizational issues. Thereby the new software development life-cycle would not distinguish between agile and plan-driven development methods and could shape itself in the changing context.