The agile journey -Adopting XP in a large financial services organization

Abstract

On January 14, 2004, two vice presidents met with a group of directors, project managers, and developers, and indicated their desire to embrace agile software development as "the way forward" in their organization. This was not the beginning of this company's adoption of XP and Agile Methodologies, but rather the culmination of almost two and a half years of learning, experimentation, prototyping, and promotion. Making change "stick" in any large organization is problematic, and dramatically changing the way a risk-averse, highly-regulated company develops software requires more than just a successful pilot and a couple of months of coaching. This experience report documents the "agile journey" undertaken by one such corporation between 2001 and 2004. They began by outsourcing a small effort to an XP-proficient consulting firm, and proceeded to use agile techniques on a series of increasingly-significant efforts, allowing sufficient time for the new approach to gain acceptance. In retrospect, all parties involved now believe that the slow, gradual approach to XP adoption - building on incremental successes project by project - was the key to its success. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.