Agile Development at ABC - What Went Wrong?

Agile development methods continue to enjoy widespread use, with more and more companies transitioning to agile methods. Current literature suggests that most of those companies are successful in making the transition, but others are not so successful. This paper examines one such company – referred to within as the ‘ABC Company’ to maintain their privacy – and analyzes and discusses their struggles with implementing agile methods. In short, it appears that lack of firm leadership commitment to agile, absence of a clearly defined customer to provide clearly defined requirements or push for additional software capabilities, failure to provide adequate initial or ongoing training and support to the organization as a whole, and underestimating the change management requirements were contributing factors to ABC’s struggles with implementing agile methods. These conclusions were reached based on a series of interviews with company employees, review of the relevant literature, and comparisons with other similar case studies.