How Agile Impacts a Software Corporation: An Empirical Study

Agile methods advocating early and frequent delivery, incremental and iterative development, and adaptive planning gradually becomes a popular software development methodology around the world. Many top software companies adopt agile methods and develop lots of remarkable software products. Although many researchers have studied agile methods using various approaches, whether and how agile methods help developers establish better software is still controversial. In this paper, we study the business data, development, and human resources records provided by Titansoft, a Singapore IT service corporation which is well-known in its successful Agile experiences. From analysis of the data, three primary impacts brought by agile adoption are revealed: (1) A temporary business stagnation; (2) Improvement in product quality; (3) Positive evolution in corporate culture. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is one of the few studies discussing how agile methods influence a software company in software development, business, and corporate culture aspects throughout a relatively long duration (more than 5 years).