Agile development methods through the eyes of Organisational Network Analysis

Agile software development is all about creating a healthy environment where everyone concerned with the development process collaborates efficiently. The major advantage of agile development methods is that they take into account the way the human society works and interacts. This paper's purpose is to analyse one of the most used agile development methods, SCRUM, from the point of view of information flow and exchange. Having as a model a software company we shall create graphs that capture the transfer of information from different perspectives. In analysing the information flow through the networks we shall use one of the most recent developed methods, called Organisational Networks Analysis (ONA). ONA is based on the techniques used in Social Network Analysis, techniques used to analyse formal or informal networks that appear in an organisation. The information exchange graphs are created with the purpose to approximate three perspectives of information flow: Stakeholders' requests, between teams skill exchange, inside teams skill exchange; We shall prove that SCRUM's effects on organisational structures has important benefits on the transfer of information. To measure these benefits we shall compare SCRUM's organisational structure with the classical hierarchical structure.