INTRODUCTION about me, about thesis, about questionnaire

1. Primary identity of your organization

o Computer related (IS/MIS/DP/Hardware/Software)
o Telecommunications
o Banking/insurance
o Engineering/construction
o Other (please specify)
2. The number of employees in your organization is
o Less than 10
o 10 20
o 21 40
o 41 100
o 101 500
o 501 1000
o Greater than 1000
3. The number of employees in your team is
o Less than 5
o 5 10
o 11 20
o 21 40
o Greater than 40
4. Your role in the team
o Functional Manager
o Project Manager
o Team Leader
o Developer/ Tester
o Other (please specify)
5. You have been familiar with agile software development practices for
o Less than 1 year
o 1 3 years
o 3 5 years
o Greater than 5 years
6. You have been developing software using agile principles/methods for
o Less than 1 year
o 1 3 years
o 3 5 years
o Greater than 5 years
7. The checklist below will help in assessing the degree of practice of agile software
development principles by your team. It contains 12 statements. (Likert scale)
o We give high priority to satisfying customers through early and continuous
delivery of valuable software.
o We welcome changing requirements, even late during development.
o We deliver working software more frequently, from couple of weeks to a couple
of months, with a preference to a shorter timescale.

o Our business people and developers work together daily (very closely)
throughout the project.
o We build projects around motivated individuals. We give them the environment
and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
o We emphasize more on face-to-face communication for conveying information
to and within the development team.
o We measure and track progress based on working software.
o We promote sustainable development. Our sponsors, developers, and users
maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
o Our software development project team follows continuous attention to
technical excellence and good design for development.
o We practice simple designs, processes, and approaches in our software
development methodologies. We implement features that are required by the
customers nothing more.
o Our development teams are self-organizing. Our team can (re) organize
continuously in different configurations to meet the changing requirements and
the newly arising challenges of the business.
o At regular intervals, our team reflects on how to become more effective, then
tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Success Factor Survey
Please indicate your level of agreement of the following statements based on your
experience of agile software development practices in your team within your
organization. Your replies should reflect your best guess from your knowledge and
experience of software development projects performed by your tram in your
organization. (Likert scale)
1. In our projects, we give very high priority to achieving customer satisfaction.
(customer satisfaction)
2. In our projects, customers closely collaborate with the development team
members. (customer collaboration)
3. In our software development projects, customers are committed to the project,
i.e.they are motivated, active, and consider themselves to be responsible elements of
the project. (customer commitment)
4. We strive to make important project decisions rapidly within short timeframes.
(decision time)
5. The members in our team are geographically closely located. (team distribution)
6. The other teams that we interact with within or outside our organization are
geographically closely located to ours. (team distribution)
7. We work in small teams (no more than 20-40 members) in our projects. (team size)
8. Our organization encourages rapid communication.
9. Our organization has the culture for trusting people.
10. Our management has the culture for supporting the decisions of the developers.
11. Our organizational culture is customer centric.
12. Our organization encourages fast feedback from customers.
13. Our organization does not have a bureaucratic management structure.
14. Our management, developers, and testers are in total agreement to use agile
practices.
15. Our software development team relies on internalized, informal, undocumented
plans (as against formal document plans). (planning)
16. Our software development team has qualitative control (as against quantitative
performance measures). (control)

17. Our team generally consists of technically competent and experienced people
(who have developed alike software in the past, have practical experience of the
technology domain). (technical competency).
18. The majority of our team members have strong interpersonal and communication
skills.
19. The majority of the members of our team consists of people who are motivated.
20. The majority of the members of our team consists of people who have
collaborative attitude.
21. The majority of the members of our team consists of people who have sense of
responsibility.
22. Our projects have mechanisms that enable personnel to communicate and
negotiate quickly and effectively with developers, operations, support, customers,
management, and business areas.
23. In most cases, communication and negotiation in our projects are face-to-face.
24. In most cases, communication and negotiation in our projects happen between
people who are physically close to one another.
25. In most cases, communication and negotiation in our projects happen between
people who work in the same (similar) time zone as ours.
26. Most people in our projects are amicable to each other to such an extent that they
communicate with each other with trust and good will.
27. Our team members are in general always willing to continuously learn from one
another and train them through mentoring and professionally guided discussions than
through formal training. (training and learning)
# Please rate, on a scale of 1 to 5, your assessment of the degree of impact of
practicing agile software development principles in your projects.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Reduced delivery schedules.

Increased return of investment (ROI).
Increased ability to meet with the current customer requirements.
Increased flexibility to meet with the changing customer requirements.
Improved business processes.

Changes and Challenges Survey

The information collected from the survey questions below will enable us to enhance
our understanding of the critical changes required and the challenges/risks involved in
introducing agile software development practices in organizations practicing plandriven (traditional) software development methodologies.
CHANGES REQUIRED
According to your view, are the following changes required for adopting agile software
development practices in organizations practicing traditional, plan driven software
development methodologies? Rank: 1 not important at all 5 very important
Changes in organizational culture
1. From policy and procedure based development culture to freedom of development
and management by team members.
2. From individually assigned roles to that of team-work.
3. From solitary development attitudes of team members to that of working in teams.

4. From no technical and interpersonal competency requirements in team composition

to establishing a minimum set of competency requirements of team members.
5. From non-customer-centric to customer-centric development.
Changes in management style
6. From command-and-control management to leadership-and-collaboration.
7. From authoritative to collaborative and pluralistic decision making (i.e. where all the
development team members are given sufficient importance in decision making).
Changes in knowledge management strategy
8. From heavy documentation-based to tacit (not spoken) knowledge management.
Changes in development processes
9. From heavily process-centric to short, iterative, test-driven, and people-centric
development.
10. From standards compliance and measurement driven development to
development under uncertainty.
11. From contract-compliant to change-tolerant development.
12. From lifecycle-based development to feature-driven evolutionary and iterative
development.

CHALLENGES / RISKS INVOLVED

According to your view, rank the degree of importance of the challenges/risks involved
in adopting agile software development practices in organizations practicing
traditional, plan driven software development methodologies. Rank: 1 not important
at all 5 very important
1. Resistance from developers to transform from traditional heavyweight processcentric development.
2. Developer perceptions of micromanagement due to close and frequent interaction
with management in agile development.
3. Developer perceptions of freedom from traditional day-to-day work schedule (based
on Gantt Chart).
4. Problems with development teams that are geographically distributed and not
collocated in agile development.
5. Differences in productivity between team members in agile software development.
6. Decrease in the productivity between team members during transition to agile
software development due to their inexperience with the agile methodologies.
7. Excessive enthusiasm in team members due to perceptions of agility and fast
decision making, leading to decision making without much forethought in agile
development.
8. Tester resistance to working closely with developers in agile development.
9. Upper management resistance due to factors such as lack of development under
contract, and well-defined project charters, project plans and Gantt Charts in agile
development.
10. Human resource resistance in the absence of being able to assign fixed roles and
responsibilities to employees in agile development, and being able to track their
performance based on those fixed assignments.

11. Challenges of the agile teams in integrating the development processes and
subsystems with teams within the same organization practicing traditional
development methodologies.
12. Development process conflicts due to the differences in lifecycle between agile
methodologies (characterized by test driven design, short, and focused iterations of
development), and traditional methodologies (heavyweight processes and long
iterations).
13. Adopting agile methodologies for use in legacy systems, which are resistant to
changes in internal source code.
14. Differences in development processes between agile methodologies (informal
requirements driven) and traditional methodologies (formal requirements driven).
15. Differences in performance management approaches in traditional methodologies
(more contract and milestone driven), and agile methodologies (based on
incorporating continuous customer feedback into the development lifecycle).
16. Continued conformance to traditional certified process standards (CMM, ISO) in
organizations that have adopted them, and are in the process of adopting agile
methodologies.
17. Differences in attitudes towards project success between the management
practicing traditional and agile methodologies.
18. Differences between the team size requirements and suitability of the agile and
traditional methodologies.
19. Problems with selecting the appropriate agile methodology and the supporting
tools according to organizational needs and characteristics.

Appreciation for the time, and help

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