Influences on Agile Practice Tailoring in Enterprise Software Development

Abstract

Agile development projects have become a reality in large enterprises using offshore development models. A case study involving seven international companies with offices in Bangalore, India, and London, UK was conducted, including interviews with 19 practitioners. The contribution of this paper is to illustrate the reasons for tailoring Agile practices within the context of large enterprises. The findings show that scrum roles and practices did not conflict with enterprise policies or processes and were thought to improve product quality and productivity. However, agile practices from the XP tradition were not so widely adopted. Test driven development did not integrate well within enterprises where independent quality assurance teams were constituted as separate departments. Continuous integration was found to be challenging where enterprise software products required time consuming regression testing and elaborate code release processes. While adoption of coding standards and collective code ownership are necessary to facilitate interaction between disparate stakeholder groups.