Agile Development: The Promise, the Reality, the Opportunity

Agile Development has been an integral part of project management and product development since its formal introduction by the Agile Manifesto in 2001. Subsequently, Agile has rapidly gained in popularity, leading to significant improvements in on-time delivery and managing costs, as well as successful delivery of the required scope for information systems (IS) projects. Agile has even moved beyond the IS domain into other business applications. This success may be tempered somewhat by the gaps in the Agile Development process that still exist, such as a lack of complete understanding of the process or the culture changes necessary to achieve larger benefits and the complexity of integrating Agile-developed products into existing IT infrastructure. However, there is also great promise in extending Agile by incorporating new tools and concepts and applying Agile development to novel and emerging problem domains. This paper proposes a Framework for Agile Development that can be used to explore existing results from Agile development, as well as to identify future possibilities and emphasize the importance of teaching Agile development in order for it to have further influence on practice.