Challenges in Enterprise Adoption of Agile Methods - A Survey

Agile methods are a departure from plan-driven traditional approaches, where the focus is on generating early releases of working software using collaborative techniques, code refactoring, and on-site customer involvement. Research and surveys have shown that agile methodologies are an efficient way of producing software with significant advantages in production costs, time-to-market, complexity, and quality improvement over heavy-weight traditional methodologies. Even with such apparent advantages the information technology industry has not seen large-scale adoption of agile methods. In this survey paper, the major challenges in adopting agile practices by enterprises are addressed. Drawing information from the literature issues like framework for agile organizational change and adoption strategies are examined. Inputs from the industry suggest that most organizations are best suited in adopting a combination of traditional and agile methods. There is no agile methodology that can be universally applied and they all have to be tailored to integrate into existing processes.