Supported approach for agile methods adaptation: an adoption study

Adopting agile software development methods is a wide and complex organisational change that usually impacts several aspects of the organisation (e.g., its structure, culture, management practices, produced artefacts, technologies in use, etc). In order to successfully handle the several key challenges, it's crucial to understand the organisation context and carefully study the transformation strategies.

This paper presents an agile transformation experience that has been undertaken in a public organisation in Belgium and during which Scrum was applied in two pilot projects. The first project retrospective shows that the change cannot be accomplished only at the team-level without taking into account the overall structure of the organisation and that we must carefully evolve toward a context-specific adapted method. In the second pilot project, we defined structured and repeatable steps to assist the adoption of agile practices. The experience shows the usefulness of such an approach but suggests that automation efforts should be addressed.

The last section of the paper summarizes the issues encountered and presents the AM-QuICK framework which aims at providing a supported approach to guide the agile adoption, adaptation and assessment.