An Assessment of the Attitude Toward Agile in Professional Organizations

The term agile is widely used to describe an iterative and incremental approach to developing products, where small units of value are delivered frequently to customers and feedback is monitored to shape future delivery cycles.Agile practices emerged in the late-twentieth century as a response to the growing complexity of software development.The traditional project management approach, where requirements and design for the total system are created prior to implementation, was not reliably delivering high-quality results.Nowadays, agile practices are incorporated into several project methodologies widely adopted by professional organizations developing technology products.In this paper, we explore the perception of agile's effectiveness among a diverse group of professionals with experience using these methodologies.To gauge attitudes toward agile, professionals in software development, project and product management, and leadership roles were interviewed.Interviewees were asked to define the agile approach to project management in their own words, contrast the description with their understanding of traditional project management, and to describe outcomes where they have personally experienced agile practices.A questionnaire was developed and distributed to measure the strength of trends detected in interview results.We analyzed the questionnaire results to assess the relationship between experience and the perception of agile's effectiveness.We also analyzed the factors of project success in agile environments based on participants' responses including quality of engagement with business and customer stakeholders, use of agile methodology and tools.