The role of extreme programming in a plan-driven organization

Abstract

The difficulties and even lack of commitment to follow plans within plan-based organizations is a well known phenomenon (see tikyaCiborra et al. 2000; Suchman 1987). For software development companies, this problem has become an increasing dilemma, as typically plan-driven software development assessment standards like the capability maturity model (CMM) or ISO/IEC 15504 have not always been easy to conform processes against. Particularly, in environments where requirements are rapidly changing, more agile approaches such as Scrum and extreme programming (XP) have caught on. In this work, we are reporting from a case study of an organization looking to not move completely from their plan-based processes (as they are but a part of a larger organization operating in a plan-based way), but rather adapt their overarching processes in a way that allows them to use XP to support their everyday work precluded by their current processes. To this end, we present four perspectives that organizations may take when they desire or consider becoming more agile in their development. We use the Nerur et al. (2005) key issues for moving from plan-based to agile software development to compare and analyze our findings. In doing this, we highlight a set of likely criteria necessary to successfully create a combination of the plan-driven and agile approaches. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.