Modelling Interrelations Between Agile Practices: The Agile Map

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Agile Map, a systematic theoretical model that describes interrelations between agile practices to assist practitioners in effective practice selection and combination.

Contribution

The paper presents the Agile Map, a novel systematic model that maps interrelations between agile practices to aid in their effective adoption.

Findings

The Agile Map reveals key interrelations between agile practices.

Practitioners can use the model to improve practice selection.

The model enhances understanding of practice coherences.

Abstract

Agile methods are defined through guidelines comprising various practices intended to enable agile ways of working. These guidelines further comprise a specific set of agile practices aiming to enable teams for an agile way of working. However, due to its wide-spread use in practice we know that agile practices are adopted and tailored intensively, which lead to a high variety of agile practices in terms of their level of detail. Problem: A high variety of agile practices can be challenging as we do not know how different agile practices are interrelated with each other. To be more precise, tailoring and adopting agile practices may lead to the challenge, that the combinatorial use of several agile practices can only be successful to a limited extent, as practices support or even require each other for a effective use in practice. Objective: Our study aims to provide an enabler for this problem. We want to identify interrelations between agile practices and describe them in a systematic manner. Contribution: The core contribution of this paper is the Agile Map, a theoretical model describing relations between agile practices following a systematic approach aiming to provide an overview of coherences between agile practices. The model aims to support practitioners in selecting and combining agile practices in a meaningful way.