Abstract
Business value is a key concept in agile software development. This paper presents results of a case study on how business value and its creation is perceived in the context of agile projects. Our overall conclusion is that the project participants almost never use an explicit and structured approach to guide the value creation throughout the project. Still, the application of agile methods in the studied cases leads to satisfied clients. An interesting result of the study represents the fact that the agile process of many projects differs significantly from what is described in the agile practitioners’ books as best practices. The key implication for research and practice is that we have an incentive to pursue the study of value creation in agile projects and to complement it by providing guidelines for better client’s involvement, as well as by developing structured methods that will enhance the value-creation in a project.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abrahamsson, P., Salo, O., Ronkainen, J., Warsta, J.: Agile Software Development Methods: Review and Analysis, VTT Technical Report (2002)
Agile Alliance, Manifesto for Agile Software Development, February 13 (2001), http://www.agilemanifesto.org/
Aurum, A., Wohlin, C.: A Value-Based Approach in Requirements Engineering: Explaining Some of the Fundamental Concepts. In: Sawyer, P., Paech, B., Heymans, P. (eds.) REFSQ 2007. LNCS, vol. 4542, pp. 109–115. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Barney, S., Aurum, A., Wohlin, C.: A Product Management Challenge: Creating Software Product Value through Requirements Selection. Journal of Software Architecture 54, 576–593 (2008)
Barney, S., Wohlin, C., Aurum, A.: Balancing software product investments. In: Proc. of the Symposium on Empiricl Software Engineering (ESEM), pp. 257–268 (2009)
Biffl, S., Aurum, A., Boehm, B., Erdogmus, H., Grünbacher, P. (eds.): Value-based Software Engineering. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Boehm, B.: Software Engineering Economics. Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs (1981)
Cao, L., Ramesh, B.: Agile Requirements Engineering Practices: An Empirical Study. IEEE Software 25(01), 60–67 (2008)
Charmaz, K.: Constructing Grounded Theory: a Practical Guide through Qualitative Research. Sage, Thousand Oaks (2007)
Cohn, M.: Agile Planning and Estimating. Prentice Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs (2005)
Favaro, J.M.: That Elusive Business Value: Some Lessons from the Top. In: Baumeister, H., Marchesi, M., Holcombe, M. (eds.) XP 2005. LNCS, vol. 3556, p. 199. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Fitzgerald, B., Hartnett, G., Conboy, K.: Customising Agile methods to Software Practices at the Intel Shannon. European J. of Info. Syst. 15(2), 200–213 (2009)
Larman, C., Vodde, B.: Practices for Scaling Lean and Agile Development: Large, Multisite and Offshore Projects with Large-Scale Scrum. Addison-Wesley, Reading (2008)
Little, T.: Schedule estimation and uncertainty surrounding the cone of uncertainty. IEEE Software 23(3), 48–54 (2006)
Little, T.: Value Creation and Capture: a Model of the Software Development Process. IEEE Software, 48–54 (2004)
Peterson, K., Wohlin, C.: A Comparison of issues and Advantages in Agile and Incremental Development between State of the Art and an Industrial Case. Journal of Systems and Software 82, 1479–1490 (2009)
Racheva, Z., Daneva, M., Sikkel, K.: Value Creation by Agile Projects: Methodology or Mystery? In: 10th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, pp. 141–155. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Rönkkö, M., Frühwirth, C., Biffl, S.: Integrating Value and Utility Concepts into a Value Decomposition Model for Value-Based Software Engineering. In: 10th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, pp. 362–374. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Schwaber, K.: Agile Project Management with SCRUM. Microsoft Press, Redmond, Washington (2004)
Sutherland, J., Altman, I.: Take No Prisoners: How a Venture Capital Group Does Scrum. In: Proceedings of AGILE 2009, Chicago, MI (USA), August 24-28, pp. 350–355. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Wieringa, R.: Design Science and Software Engineering, In: ICSOFT (2009)
Yin, R.K.: Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Sage, Thousand Oaks (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Racheva, Z., Daneva, M., Sikkel, K., Buglione, L. (2010). Business Value Is Not Only Dollars – Results from Case Study Research on Agile Software Projects. In: Ali Babar, M., Vierimaa, M., Oivo, M. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6156. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13792-1_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13792-1_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-13791-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-13792-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)