Is there an agile handover? An empirical study of documentation and project handover practices across agile software teams

The growing use of agile and lean methods has heated the discussion on efficiency and sustainability of software engineering processes. During project handovers, for example, loss of knowledge has been indicated and critics of agile methods point at a lack of documentation. In this paper we take the perspective of patterns of human action, looking at the actions the teams take and the artifacts they use during a software project handover. Our results from 30 teams in small to large size projects cover the perceptions of a variety of roles and indicate that the adoption is a learning process in three interdependent phases: Environment, System and Architecture. The participants in our study perceived the biggest gaps in the usefulness of available design and requirements documentation. Based on our findings we suggest that documentation artifacts should rather support the learning process and that including maintenance staff in the development process significantly helps improving the handover.