Agile Islands in a Waterfall Environment: Challenges and Strategies in Automotive
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Date
2020
Journal Title
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Abstract
Driven by the need for faster time-to-market and reduced development lead-time, large-scale systems engineering companies
are adopting agile methods in their organizations. This agile transformation is challenging and it is common that
adoption starts bottom-up with agile software teams within the context of traditional company structures. This creates
the challenge of agile teams working within a documentcentric and plan-driven (or waterfall) environment. While it may be desirable to take the best of both worlds, it is not clear how that can be achieved especially with respect
to managing requirements in large-scale systems. This paper presents an exploratory case study focusing on two departments
of a large-scale systems engineering company (automotive) that is in the process of company-wide agile
adoption. We present challenges that agile teams face while working within a larger plan-driven context and propose
potential strategies to mitigate the challenges. Challenges relate to, e.g., development teams not being aware of the
high-level requirements, difficulties to manage change of these requirements as well as their relationship to backlog
items such as user stories. While we found strategies for solving most of the challenges, they remain abstract and
empirical research on their effectiveness is currently lacking
Description
Keywords
Agile islands, Hybrid methods, Co-existence
Citation
Kasauli, R., Knauss, E., Nakatumba-Nabende, J., & Kanagwa, B. (2020). Agile islands in a waterfall environment: Challenges and strategies in automotive. In Proceedings of the Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (pp. 31-40).