Exploring the Transient Nature of Agile Project Management Practices

Agile software projects have considerable freedom in shaping their emerging project management practices, and there are established ways to do that, e.g., with process retrospectives. The practices may change due to many reasons, such as (i) changes to critical system or process properties, (ii) process context, (iii) process capability maturity, etc. Maturity is not the only reason and a suitable wider perspective and support is necessary to handle the transient nature of agile practices. We propose to use a value-based approach and shift the discussion from the conventional solution space to the goal (value) space. Further we recommend an impact estimation approach for identifying current practice state (agile positioning) and a corresponding approach for navigating through the value (and solution) space as well as ways to visualize the results. This work underlies the ongoing development of an agile positioning and navigation tool including a survey approach to practice and tool impact analysis and estimation.