A tale of two projects [agile projects]

The author had a unique opportunity to experience and analyze the adoption of agile practices on two projects at a major car rental company which, although sharing many similarities including staff, professed commitment to agile process, architecture, and programming environment, experienced two drastically different outcomes. The first became bogged down and eventually went to production late, over-budget, with fewer features then expected, and was only reluctantly embraced by its user community. The second was ready for its first production milestone after only 9 weeks, was enthusiastically embraced by its users, and went on to become an unqualified success and a model for other software development projects at this company. In this report the author illustrates the similarities between these two projects, highlight the differences, and draw conclusions about the factors critical to the success of agile projects in large corporate environments.