A case study to enable and monitor real IT companies migrating from waterfall to agile

Abstract

Agile development methods are becoming increasingly important to face continuously changing requirements. Nevertheless, the adoption of such methods in industrial environments still needs to be fostered. Companies call for tools to keep under control both agility and coordination of IT teams. In this paper, we report on an empirical case study aiming at enabling real companies migrating from Waterfall to Agile. Our research effort has been spent in introducing 11 different IT small and medium-sized enterprises to Agile, and to observe them executing projects. To have a common evaluation framework, we selected a set of 61 metrics, with the purpose of measuring the evolution towards Agile. We provide readers with empirical data on two categories of companies' feedbacks: (i) the metrics they considered to be useful beyond the theoretical definitions; (ii) the tools they integrated with existing development environments to collect data from metrics, and evaluate quantitative improvements of Agile. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.