Agile Development in Practice: Lessons from the Trenches

ABSTRACT

In the twenty years since the agile approach to systems development was introduced, a wide range of organizations have adopted its principles. Despite numerous reports that highlight agile success stories, there are relatively few recent publications that provide practical guidance on the potential pitfalls and areas of risk related to agile. In response, this practice-oriented paper draws on 56 practitioner interviews to identify a series of “lessons learned” pertaining to agile adoption, tailoring, and use.

KEYWORDS:

• Agile
• systems development
• lessons learned

Notes

1. We follow the terminology used in past publications, including Iivari et al. (2000), Huisman and Iivari (2006), and Cram and Brohman (2013), by distinguishing between a development approach (i.e., the high-level systems development principles, such as agile), a methodology (i.e., a collection of guiding concepts, such as eXtreme Programming), and development practice (i.e., a lower level activity, such as pair programming).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

W. Alec Cram

W. Alec Cram is an Assistant Professor of Information and Process Management at Bentley University. He received a Ph.D. from Queen’s University. Alec previously worked as an IT Audit Manager at Deloitte, where he received a CISSP and CISA. Alec’s research focuses on how information systems control initiatives can contribute to improving the performance of organizational processes. His work has been published in outlets including the Information Systems Journal, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of the Association for Information Systems and Information and Management.