Extending Software Project Agility with New Product Development Enterprise Agility

Many new product development (NPD) companies must nowadays work under turbulent conditions. The market competition is often fierce, while at the same time new and sometimes even disruptive technological uncertainties emerge. Speed and flexibility are then key success factors. Agility is thus a prospective strategy for such companies. The (embedded) software product development projects working in such environments face the turbulence either directly or indirectly, and agile software methods could potentially help to cope with the challenges. However, in large NPD environments the software project agility must be combined with the overall enterprise agility in order for the company to meet the ultimate business goals. This exploratory article investigates software project agility from that point of view by constructing a framework of the considerations for larger NPD companies to achieve more overarching agility. The software process improvement (SPI) activities can then be focused accordingly. An industrial product development case example is illustrated, suggesting how software product development agility should be improved within the larger organizational context (SPI-in-the-large). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.