Practical Experiences of Agility in the Telecom Industry

This paper discusses the adoption level of and experiences from using agile practices in three software development projects in a large Telecom company. The use of agile practices was more emergent than planned. Project managers and developers simply used practices they considered efficient and natural. The most widely adopted agile practices were to measure progress by working code, to have developers estimate task efforts, to use coding standards, having no continuous overtime, to have the team develop its own processes, to use limited documentation, and to have the team in one physical location. The projects used conventional testing approaches. Adoption of agile testing practices, i.e., test first and automated unit tests, was low. Some agile practices can just emerge without conscious adoption, because developers find them useful. However, it seems that an emergent process aiming for agility may also neglect important agile practices.