Agile Governance Guidelines for Software Development SMEs

This paper presents a PhD thesis proposal about agile governance for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) of software development. Agile adoption at the team level is now mainstream. However, many organizations continue to use traditional approaches to govern agile teams. This phenomenon, known as organizational type mismatch, has been found to have harmful effects on organizational performance and team morale. Although there are some solutions, they mostly focus on large organizations, while the SMEs domain remains unaddressed. This research proposes lightweight agile governance guidelines for software SMEs. To do this, we follow the design science framework to 1) harmonize the CMMI V2.0 governance practices with SAFe 5.0 practices; 2) contextualize the harmonization result for software development SMEs; and 3) apply a mixed-methods strategy to assess whether and, if so, to what extent our guidelines help SMEs to address the organizational type mismatch and reduce its impact.