Organisational changes in
migration to agile
development strategies
A review of:
Challenges of migrating to agile methodologies
Sridhar Nerur, Radha Kanta Mahapatra, George Mangalaraj in
Communications of the ACM, 2005, Vol 48 issue 5, pp 72 – 78
Introduction
Agile development methodologies
becoming popular
 Migration to agile development has been
covered from developer point of view
 Organisations need to manage this
change

What are agile methodologies?
Cope with changing requirements
 Short iterations
 Few artefacts
 TDD
 No central control
 Feature-led, not task-led

Why agile methodologies?
Development is a time-consuming
process, and requirements change over
time
 Organisations need to adapt to change
 Handle inaccurate requirements gracefully
 Business-oriented

Goals

Present impact of agile methods on the
structure of an organisation

Compare traditional and agile methods
from organisational viewpoint
Change in management style
Traditional methods use command and
control
 Agile methods favour a collaborative
environment
 No central management
 Minimal artefacts showing current state

Power shift
Lack of central control removes power
from managers
 Tacit knowledge is not transparent
 Critical decisions made by development
team

Elitist culture
Traditional methods don’t compare well
 Agile development needs good staff
 Teams left with traditional methods feel left
out

Harder decision making
Decision environment is diverse
 Every stakeholder has a different agenda
 No centralised control

Cooperative customers
Agile development includes on-site
customer
 Opportunity to clarify requirements
 Rapid feedback cycle
 Expensive investment!

C.R.A.C.K. customers
Collaborative
 Representative
 Authorised
 Committed
 Knowledgeable
 Picky list of requirements!

Cost of changes
All change requires costs
 Planning
 Procedures
 Structures
 Skills
 Communication methods

New tools
Agile technology favours OO
 Potential cost of new development
platform
 Developmers need to acquire new
language

New procedures
Agile tech recommends procedures that
may not be in place
 Unit testing
 Version control
 Deployment
 Refactoring

Current literature
Relies on existing work
 Mainly a collation
 Older literature in the field exists
 Managerial viewpoint is fairly unexplored

Possible extensions
Case studies
 Specific identification of pitfalls
 Metrics
 Examining general effect of organisational
change

Conclusions
Migrating to agile methodologies is costly
 Both developers and managers need to
plan change
 Culture shift may occur
 Opportunities for further investigation
