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Top1. Introduction
Companies employ project management approach in the development and implementation of software in their environments. In recent years, companies change from the traditional waterfall to what is considered a more dynamic approach, agile practices for various reasons. Some of the key benefits include flexibility to make changes to project requirements, less documentation, earlier defect detection, and customers’ feedback (Laanti, Salo, & Abrahamsson, 2011). In addition, agile practices seem to provide more transparency than waterfall approach, which assist some organizations to validate their requirements. Perhaps the most important benefit of agile practice is the ability to get a working software product or features to market faster than waterfall approach.
Despite the numerous benefits and advantages of agile approach for software development, its adoption has been challenging (Boehm & Turner, 2005; Nerur, Mahapatra, & Mangalaraj, 2005). The challenge gets worse when the approach had to be adopted at an enterprise level. In recents years, researchers note that organizations that have stable requirements can develop successful projects by using waterfall (McHugh, McCaffery, & Casey, 2012). In attempts to find a more suitable approach, some organizations have resulted to hybrid agile, such as Scrum-Fall, a combination of waterfall and Scrum development methods (Binder, Aillaud, & Schilli, 2014; Rahmanian, 2014; Adelakun, Garcia, Tabaka, & Ismail, 2017).
Agile scrum stipulates that the scrum team should be co-located in order to increase the level of interaction and collaboration among team members. This is well documented in agile guide at scrum.org. Despite the documentation, it remains a challenge for global teams. Also, scrum stipulated that agile scrum teams should meet on daily bases for about 10 or15 minutes for a ceremony called daily scrum. The daily scrum ceremony is a major challenge for virtual teams that are geographically separated across the globe. The major challenges are differences in time zone and language. This makes some argue that scrum should be used only for local teams, and waterfall for global teams.
This paper shows evidence that both software teams separated by geographical locations and those in the same location can choose either agile or traditional (waterfall), to successfully develop a software application. This paper reports an experimental research involving global virtual teams across seven countries in four continents, North America, South America, Europe, and Africa. The experiment was conducted from 2011 to 2018. The data for this paper was collected during the 7 years of the experiment.
The actor-network theory (ANT) was selected to underpin this study. This means that the theory is used as a lens in analysing and gaining an understanding of human activities in the selection and use of agile or waterfall method, for software development. The theory was selected primarily because the theory is concerned about actors’ interaction, relationship, and how networks (teams) are created including the activities. The main tenets of ANT are actor, network, and translation. Both human and nonhuman are regarded as actors, and a network is an alliance, formation of common interest by actors (Callon, 1986). From the perspective of ANT, the moments of translation provide a conceptual framework for analysing and understanding human activity. Increasingly, theories are used as lenses in IS studies through which researchers perform analysis of data and interpretation of findings. In Walsham’s (2006) explanation, a sociotechnical theory can be used as an initial guide to a study design and as part of an iterative process in the collection and analysis of data.
The paper is structure into seven main sections, it began with introduction, followed by problematisation and motivation for the study. In the third section, an overview of managing traditional and Agile software development is presented. The fourth section presents a discussion about the theory, ANT that underpins the study. The methodology employed in this study, and the findings from analysis are discussed in sections five and six, respectively. The conclusion is drawn in the final section.