This dissertation aims to assist Agile champions in their organisations with their Agile adoption journey. Such a journey typically starts with identifying the Agile challenges and then determining how to address these challenges in their unique context (Hajjdiab & Taleb, 2011a:9). This study provides a manual together with an automated framework to showcase a list of prioritised Agile challenges and their corresponding possible solutions. Before reaching this automated framework, the research presented a comprehensive list of Agile adoption challenges, possible solutions and a mapping between them. The automated framework, also named Agile Adoption Coach (AAC), is in the form of an online tool: www.agilesense.coza/aac. The critical quantitative contribution to this study was the evaluation of the AAC by Scrum Masters and Agile coaches to determine the acceptability of the tool. The research has shown that there is, on average, an 86% acceptability rating for this tool in South Africa. / School of Computing / M. Sc. (Computing)

Context. In recent years there has been observed a significant shift from plan-driven development towards agile, which is considered as a vast improvement to processes. However, it has also been spotted that agile methodologies are hardly ever applied in their pure form. Moreover, hybrid processes as combinations of plan-driven and agile practices emerge. In addition, agile adoption has been reported to result in both: benefits and limitations. Objectives. In this study the following matters are investigated: 1) the commonness of plan driven and agile practices usage, 2) common practices combinations, 3) patterns for agile adoption over time, 4) hybrid development models and 5) the actual effects of agile adoption in terms of benefits and limitations as perceived by practitioners. Methods. The thesis presents an empirical investigation of software development organizations. The objectives are achieved through a targeted survey based on existing evidence and a multidimensional data analysis. The mean for obtaining data is a web-based questionnaire with an interactive board with practices and time indication sliders (to capture applied development models and practices adoption strategies) and hierarchical cumulative voting (to measure the relative significance of benefits and limitations). The data analysis is supported by hierarchical cluster analysis and an extended hierarchical voting analysis framework (EHV-F). Results. In total, 45 practitioners have been successfully surveyed. The commonness of 7 plan-driven and 14 agile practices usage was investigated. The relative significance of agile adoption benefits (32 factors in 10 categories) and limitations (23 factors in 7 categories) was measured with respect to global view (all respondents and perspectives), different agile adoption strategies as well as distinguished development models. Conclusions. It is concluded that agile practices dominate over plan-driven, however, hybrid approaches, being combinations of plan-driven and agile practices, are frequently applied. It is also concluded that some practices are commonly used together since they facilitate each other (e.g. continuous integration with testing which facilitate short iterations and releases). Some agile practices are still unsuccessfully applied and eventually abandoned (e.g. pair programming), what should be further investigated by researchers. Incremental agile adoption strategy was found to be the most beneficial approach. It is also concluded that agile adoption leads first of all to improved quality of working life, increased knowledge transfer and improved verification and validation processes. On the other hand, agile adoption is very demanding since it requires high professional skills from development teams as well as managers. Hence, more resources should be devoted to training on agile for all the parties involved in development. Agile is still commonly considered to be poorly scalable. Moreover, the quality of design with agile methods is not considered as a benefit at all. These areas should be further investigated by researchers.

For the last decade the IT industry has been transitioning to Agile software development due to the impending need for a more flexible development process. China’s IT industry is growing drastically, but to stay competitive in the global market the Chinese organizations have to constantly adapt and reorient to today’s market needs. The purpose of this study is to determine if Agile methodologies and practices are suitable for the software industry in China. The study describes the fundamentals of Agile software development and analyzes the success factors of Agile adoption. Further analysis of Agile and its relation to culture is conducted, as well as an analysis of China, its national and organizational culture, and its software industry. Several hypothesis regarding potential barriers of Agile adoption in China were constructed to guide the design of the survey questionnaire. In the analysis of the survey data it was concluded that the communication aspect does pose as a barrier for Agile adoption in China, whereas the cognitive, social, organizational culture, competence and recruitment and managerial aspects all are concluded to not be barriers for Agile adoption. The overall result indicates that Agile methodologies are suitable, and should be favorable for the software development organizations in China. / IT-branschen har under det senaste decenniet anammat Agila metoder för att fylla ett behov av en mer flexibel utvecklingsprocess. Kinas IT-industri växer kraftigt, men för att öka sin globala konkurrenskraft måste den utvecklas och ständigt kunna anpassa sig efter marknadens behov. Syftet med denna studie är att avgöra om Agila metoder och arbetssätt är lämpliga för den Kinesiska mjukvaruindustrin. Studien beskriver grunderna i Agil mjukvaruutveckling och analyserar viktiga faktorer vid införandet av Agila metoder. Vidare undersöker den Kinas kultur, organisationskultur samt dess mjukvaruindustri. I studien utformades några hypoteser om möjliga hinder vid anammandet av Agila metoder, som vidare användes för utformandet av en enkätundersökning. I analysen av enkätdata konstaterades det att kommunikationsaspekten är ett hinder, medan de kognitiva, sociala och organisationskulturella aspekterna samt kompetens- och rekryteringsaspekten och organisationsledningsaspekten samtliga ej anses som hinder för införandet av Agila metoder. Slutsatsen är att Agila metoder är lämpliga, och bör adopteras av kinesiska mjukvaruföretag.

Many organizations aspire to adopt agile processes to take advantage of the numerous benefits that it offers to an organization. Those benefits include, but are not limited to, quicker return on investment, better software quality, and higher customer satisfaction. To date however, there is no structured process (at least that is published in the public domain) that guides organizations in adopting agile practices. To address this situation, we present the Agile Adoption Framework and the innovative approach we have used to implement it. The framework consists of two components: an agile measurement index, and a 4-Stage process, that together guide and assist the agile adoption efforts of organizations. More specifically, the Sidky Agile Measurement Index (SAMI) encompasses five agile levels that are used to identify the agile potential of projects and organizations. The 4-Stage process, on the other hand, helps determine (a) whether or not organizations are ready for agile adoption, and (b) guided by their potential, what set of agile practices can and should be introduced. To help substantiate the "goodness" of the Agile Adoption Framework, we presented it to various members of the agile community, and elicited responses through questionnaires. The results of that substantiation effort are encouraging, and also suggest further avenues for improvement. / Ph. D.

The popularity of agile methodologies is steadily increasing. This study is an intent to balance the agile change literature with a psychological perspective and quantitative measures of an agile change made within a Swedish organization. Organizational change recipients’ beliefs (discrepancy, appropriateness, valence, efficacy, & principal support) and trust in management were measured in an online survey to see how well these variables could predict a successful agile change towards transparency. The results indicate a lack of support for several previously cited success factors in the agile literature and a need for more quantitative and research-driven literature. No support could be found for a relationship between discrepancy, appropriateness, valence, principal support, trust in management, and the outcome of a successful implementation of transparency. Efficacy was found to be a significant and robust predictor of the outcome. More research is needed to ensure the generalizability of the results.

Software engineering practices have experienced significant changes over the period of past two decades. Keeping in view the competitive market trends, now is the high time for many organizations to shift from traditional waterfall models to more agile technologies like Scrum [22][23]. A change of this magnitude is often not easy to undertake. The reason that both software engineering techniques are different in many respects, organizations require considerable amount of analysis of the whole transitioning process and possible scenarios that may occur along the way. Small and medium organizations are normally very skeptical to the change of this magnitude. The scale of change is not limited to only software processes, in fact, difficult part is to deal with old attitudes and thinking processes and mold them for the new agile based Scrum development. The process of change therefore need to be understood in the first place and then carefully forwarded to the implementation phase.

While agile methods are old news amongst teams and within the field of software development, the interest of entire organisations to become agile is growing. In the process of adopting agile methods, there are several commonly known success factors and challenges for organisations to take into consideration which would ease the transformation.   Previous studies on success factors and challenges during the agile transformation have been focused on the experience of the organisation or the human resource aspect of agile. The majority of existing theory on the topic has outlined the agile transformation based on single organisational case studies, or in quantifying manors. It is however known that agile coaches carry some significance for successful transformations but the research area is lagging in the understanding of their particular role for organisational agile.  This study focuses on the experience of the agile coach of success factors and challenges and their role in assisting the organisations during the agile transformation. Through a qualitative interpretivist approach, this thesis sat out to understand the agile coaches perception of success factors and challenges and consequently their role in agile transformations. By semi-structured interviews, data was collected and later analysed thematically to find meanings and patterns among the agile coaches of their perception and contribution to successful transformations.   By studying the agile transformation from the perspective of agile coaches, this thesis (1) contributes to broadening the research area with more knowledge about the agile coach as a profession, (2) nuancing the picture of success factors and challenges linked to agile transformations through the new perspective of agile coaches, and to (3) provide new insight to this yet, underexplored area of agile coaches within the research field of organisational agile.

Citizens’ expectations of products and services produced by the public agencies are rising incredibly due to the fact that savvy startups and other global technology businesses have been succeeded in providing a high standard of digital services in the past decades. This, in turn, puts pressure on the public agencies in how they need to work in order to meet the citizens’ expectations and needs. Besides, during the years, there are a number of projects done by some of the agencies that has been identified as not having succeeded in delivering the desired value, staying in budget and delivering the project’s result in time. Therefore, there is a need for actions in order to counteract this. It is believed that applying Agile into the agency’s project management will help them to not only meet the citizens’ expectations, but also improve the project’s outcome. Many agencies have been hierarchical for a long time involving complex and rigid structure, and the fact that they have been working with a Waterfall-based methodology for a long time. Therefore, adopting this Agile approach implies a number of challenges for the agency. Thus, this thesis aims to investigate to what extent the Agile approach can be implemented into the agency by identifying the challenges that the adoption of Agile entails. A number of different previous research and literature about the Waterfall, even called traditional in this thesis, and Agile project management methods have been reviewed in order to provide theoretical frameworks that are of relevance for this study. As the research subject is quite complex and broad, a qualitative approach has been utilized to obtain in-depth knowledge. Interviews have been conducted with employees from the investigated agency, and in order to pursue a comparison with how other public agencies have worked with a potential Agile adoption, interviews have also been conducted with a second agency. The thesis finds that applying the Agile project management method into the investigated agency will imply some challenges. A total of seven different challenges were identified which can be briefly summed up as following; Employees being too comfortable with old methods; Staff has difficulty committing to the new working culture; Agile is not a “one-size-fits-all” method; Large size projects; Heavy documentation; Financial reporting practices affecting the efficiency of Agile planning; Lack of competencies or some competencies being considered rare, hence there is no guarantee for each team to have all competencies that are needed. This study’s result shows that the studied public agency can work with Agile project management methods to a wider extent than what is done today. However, there are a couple of challenges, and solely working with the Agile method was showed to not be recommended. In order to find out if the Agile approach can be used in other works that are not covered in this study, or if the result can be applied to other sectors as well, further research is required. / Invånarnas förväntan för en produkt eller tjänst framtagen av myndigheter har ökat drastiskt. Detta kan bero på att startupföretag samt andra globala tekniska företag har lyckats erbjuda digitala tjänster av hög standard under de senaste årtionden. Det sätter i sin tur press på hur myndigheten behöver arbeta för att kunna bemöta invånarnas förväntningar och behov. Under åren har dessutom ett antal projekt inom myndigheterna blivit identifierade för att inte ha lyckats leverera det önskade värdet, hålla sig inom den satta budgeten och/eller leverera projektresultat inom den satta tidsramen. Därmed finns det ett behov av åtgärder för att motarbeta detta. Ett införande av Agil projekthantering tros kunna hjälpa till med att inte bara uppnå invånarnas förväntningar och behov utan även till förbättrat projektresultat. Myndigheterna har länge varit hierarkisk bestående av komplexa och stela strukturer, dessutom har de även under en lång tid arbetat Vattenfalls-baserat när det kommer till projekthantering. Därmed kan ett införande av det Agila konceptet medföra en del utmaningar. Denna rapport har därför riktats mot att undersöka till vilken utsträckning ett Agilt tillvägagångssätt kan implementeras inom myndigheten genom att identifiera utmaningarna som det Agila kan medföra. Ett antal olika litteraturer samt tidigare forskningar inom Vattenfall, även kallat traditionell i denna rapport, och Agil projekthantering har granskats för att tillhandahålla den teoretiska biten om de olika arbetsmetoderna. I och med att detta undersökningsområde kan ses som relativt komplext och brett så har en kvalitativ undersökningsmetod använts för att få en djupare förståelse av området. Förutsättningarna av detta ges av intervjuer från anställda från den undersökta myndigheten. För att göra en jämförelse i hur andra myndigheter har arbetat med Agilt införande har intervjuer även hållits med ytterligare en myndighet. Studien visar att tillämpning av Agil projekthantering inom den undersökta myndigheten kan medföra en del utmaningar. Totalt identifierades sju olika utmaningar som är sammanfattade på följande sätt: Anställda är för bekväma med den gamla arbetsmetoden; Anställda har svårigheter med den nya arbetsmiljön; Agil är inte en metod som är av “en storlek passar alla” principen; Stora projekt; Tung dokumentation; Redovisningspraxis som påverkas av den Agila planeringen; Avsaknad av kompetens eller att vissa kompetenser anses vara en bristvara. Denna studie visar att den undersökta myndigheten kan arbeta med Agila projekthanteringsmetoder till en större utsträckning än vad som redan görs idag, däremot finns en del utmaningar, och att enbart arbeta med den Agila metoden visar sig inte vara rekommenderat. För att veta om det Agila konceptet kan användas i större utsträckning även utanför projekthantering eller om resultatet även gäller för andra sektorer krävs vidare påbyggnad av studien.

In recent years, product development organizations have started adopting agile methods beyond its intended application on software development as part of organizational aspirations to increase market responsiveness and decrease lead times. Such extended adoption of agile is now commonly known as large-scale agile transformation, yet case studies and research-based guidance on implementing agile at scale is scarce. Available literature lists several general challenges and success factors surfacing during the full course of transformation. This thesis aims to complement existing research through investigating critical factors of a large-scale transformation specifically at early stages of agile adoption. This is performed by applying Laanti's agile maturity model and Roger's innovation adoption theory to a case study of a large fintech company who recently initiated their transformation. Although many of the general challenges discovered were proven to appear even at early stages of adoption, we found four factors particularly important for early-stage adoption of large-scale agile, namely 1) having agile support tailored to team maturity, 2) involving project managers in agile coaching, 3) breaking down silo barriers and 4) developing agile customer contracts. In addition to the critical factors found, we propose an extension to Roger's adoption model in cases when external stakeholders are believed to be affected by the adoption of an innovation. Further studies on early-stage adoption of large-scale agile are required to confirm our conclusions. / Som ett led i att öka marknadsresponsivitet och minska ledtider, har det idag blivit alltmer vanligt för organisationer som utvecklar produkter att applicera agila arbetssätt utanför mjukvaruutveckling. En sådan utökad adoption av agile kallas för storskalig agile transformation. Fallstudier och forskningsbaserade råd för implementering av agile i stor skala är fortfarande få. Syftet med denna studie är att bidra till och komplettera existerande forskning genom att utforska kritiska faktorer för storskaliga agila transformationer i ett tidigt adoptionsstadie. Detta görs genom att applicera och kombinera Laanti's agila mognadsmodell och Roger's teori om innovationsadoption i en fallstudie på ett stort fintech-företag som nyligen initierade sin agila transformation. Fyra kritiska faktorer specifika för tidigaadoptionsstadier identifierades, närmare bestämt vikten av att 1) anpassa agila stödfunktioner till varje teams agila mognad, 2) involvera projektledare i agile coachning, 3) bryta ner silobarriärer mellan funktioner och 4) utveckla agila kundkontrakt. Dessutom föreslår vi en utökning av Roger's innovationsegenskaper för värdering av potentiell adoptionsframgång av innovationer som påverkar externa intressenter. Ytterligare studier på stor-skalig agil transformation i tidiga stadier krävs för att bekräfta våra slutsatser.