Agile development as a change management approach in software projects: Applied case study

Although a large amount of research has been carried out so far to study the impacts of agile methods in various phases of software engineering, only very few of these have yielded empirical evidence in the form of products being used in real life environment. Very few of these studies have been dedicated to study change management while adopting agile methods. In this paper, it has been argued that that agile software development, with its practices for user involvement and product visibility, can be used as a change management approach in most small to medium scale projects. As an illustration of the theoretical findings, the application of agile methods in managing change in two projects as Saudi Electronic University has been described. The results and findings clearly corroborate our findings and explain why agile methods should be practiced more often with for projects which need specific emphasis on change management.