Agility Facilitators for Contemporary Software Development

Agile software development generally refers to popular practices that are supposed to adhere to the Agile Manifesto with its values and principles. Empirical studies on agile software development have mainly focused on organizational adoption and impacts of agile practices. Furthermore, the literature on agile software development has mostly centered on small, co-located projects. However, agility is needed for software development projects of varied sizes in different organizations across industries. The general nature of agile values and principles and the procedure-driven nature of specific agile methods make it difficult for organizations to determine what they can do to effectively facilitate agility in their software development process. To bridge that literature gap and based on an evolved grounded-theory approach, this study identifies nine agility facilitators and their corresponding dimensions that extend beyond small, co-located projects to software projects of any size and distribution. These agility facilitators are further grouped into two categories: organizational foundation and project processes. In addition, the authors identify four dimensions of agility. The authors propose a framework that describes the organizational mechanisms through which the nine categories of facilitators lead to software development agility.