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Perspectives on Productivity and Delays in Large-Scale Agile Projects

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Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming (XP 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 149))

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Abstract

Many large and distributed companies run agile projects in development environments that are inconsistent with the original agile ideas. Problems that result from these inconsistencies can affect the productivity of development projects and the timeliness of releases. To be effective in such contexts, the agile ideas need to be adapted. We take an inductive approach for reaching this aim by basing the design of the development process on observations of how context, practices, challenges, and impacts interact. This paper reports the results of an interview study of five agile development projects in an environment that was unfavorable for agile principles. Grounded theory was used to identify the challenges of these projects and how these challenges affected productivity and delays according to the involved project roles. Productivity and delay-influencing factors were discovered that related to requirements creation and use, collaboration, knowledge management, and the application domain. The practitioners’ explanations about the factors’ impacts are, on one hand, a rich empirical source for avoiding and mitigating productivity and delay problems and, on the other hand, a good starting point for further research on flexible large-scale development.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Blekinge Institute of Technology, 371 79, Karlskrona, Sweden

    Deepika Badampudi & Samuel A. Fricker

  2. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28660, Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain

    Ana M. Moreno

Authors
  1. Deepika Badampudi
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  2. Samuel A. Fricker
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  3. Ana M. Moreno
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark

    Hubert Baumeister

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Barbara Weber

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Badampudi, D., Fricker, S.A., Moreno, A.M. (2013). Perspectives on Productivity and Delays in Large-Scale Agile Projects. In: Baumeister, H., Weber, B. (eds) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. XP 2013. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 149. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38314-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38314-4_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38313-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-38314-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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