Exploring the Relationship between Organizational Adoption Motives and the Tailoring of Agile Methods

Advocates of agile information systems development methods originally called for implementation of the method in full - either perform all of the method's practices, or don't call it “agile”. Over time this quest for orthodoxy was replaced by the pragmatic tailoring of agile methods to the organization's environment. However, little empirical research has investigated the forces that impact the manner in which agile methods are tailored. This article describes an exploratory study that investigates the relationships between the motives for adopting agile methods, and the agile practices adopted. Using the source data from the VersionOne State of Agile 2011 survey, we identified a sample of 2304 agile practitioners. Our study finds that three motives for agile adoption - a desire for increased software quality, increased efficiency, or increased effectiveness are each associated with different configurations of project management focused agile practices and agile practices related to the software development approach.