Identifying and Documenting Recurring Concerns and Good Practices of Agile Teams of an IT Consulting Company

Abstract

Since the publication of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, project that are applying agile methods become more and more popular. With the success of small agile teams, larger organizations become increasingly interested in applying agile methods in large-scale and modern development environments. This adaption process creates new concerns, like geographical distribution, dependencies or communication issues between different teams. These concerns are new and not yet fully elaborated, which means that not for every concern a well-known solution exists.\\In order to do further research on concerns in agile development and good and bad practices, when addressing these concerns, we conducted 14 semi-structured interviews with industry experts at a German IT consulting company with about 500 employees at that time. The collected data was documented by using the Large-Scale Agile Development Pattern Language, that the chair of Software Engineering for Business Information Systems (SEBIS) at the Technical University of Munich developed in 2019. Using a fixed way of documenting the findings allow to compare and collect concerns and patterns from different research projects at different organizations. This offers the opportunity to build a large pattern catalog, which provides an overview of different stakeholders, their concerns and good and bad practices to deal with these concerns. Such a pattern collection would help organizations to apply agile methods with more success in the future.

Research Questions

1) What are recurring concerns of agile teams in agile software development?

2) What are good practices for addressing recurring concerns of agile teams in agile software development?

3) Which bad practices should be avoided in agile software development?