Publisher's Synopsis
The evaluation of agile software development methodology was a potentially viable study as it is related to the organizational and individual processes involved in the development of information technology in organizations. This methodology emphasizes the need to keep code simple, test frequently, and deliver in a series of small, working packages or iterations. While there was previous research about the definition of agile development and some details of the specific agile methodologies, there did not appear to be any empirical research that addressed the opinions of project managers utilizing these current approaches in software development. The arguments for or against agile software development make sense when taken within the context regarding the benefit of speed, adaptability, and quality of the agile approach but there was no certainty that these three benefits were actually achieved when applied by software development project managers. This research dealt with the opinions, thoughts, and actual experiences of software project managers working with application software projects that used one of the agile development methodologies. Its purpose was to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of utilizing agile methodologies to ensure rapid deployment in a changing business environment. To gain some perspective of this growing aspect of application development, the researcher asked the software group within the Project Management Institute (PMI) to complete a survey that included both structured and open-ended items. Closed-ended questions were included to help keep some sense of statistical control over the data.
