The Impact of Agile Methods on Managing IT Professionals

Abstract

This chapter examines the potential for agile methods to provide mechanisms to deal with the software development environment that has evolved in response to the inadequacies of traditional, heavyweight development approaches. A framework is proposed which identifies three major areas of organizational impact that require management attention when undertaking system development in the new environment. This is followed by a detailed examination of the constructs within those three main areas, and assesses the potential for agile methods to address those issues. The current literature and empirical research into agile methods (and eXtreme Programming in particular) underpins the proposals for dealing with contemporary software development challenges. The authors hope that understanding the environment from the perspective of the framework will assist managers in their perception of the challenges of contemporary software development, and provide them with a firm basis on which to consider the adoption of agile methods.