Towards a Taxonomy of Agile Methods: The Tree of Agile Elements

Agile methods require constant optimization of one’s approach and leading to the adaptation of agile practices. These practices are also adapted when introducing them to companies and their software development teams due to organizational constraints. As a consequence of the widespread use of agile methods, we notice a high variety of their elements: Practices, roles, and artifacts. This multitude of agile practices, artifacts, and roles results in an unsystematic mixture. It leads to several questions: When is a practice a practice, and when is it a method or technique? This paper presents the tree of agile elements, a taxonomy of agile methods, based on the literature and guidelines of widely used agile methods. We describe a taxonomy of agile methods using terms and concepts of software engineering, in particular software process models. We aim to enable agile elements to be delimited, which should help companies, agile teams, and the research community gain a basic understanding of the interrelationships and dependencies of individual components of agile methods.