The Impact of an Agile Methodology on Software Development Costs

With the emergence of the Internet, software development has become an integral part of almost every facet of business today. Because consumers have a surmounting demand for immediacy and convenience, companies are pressured to add web-based services to their product offerings. Therefore, an increasing number of resources are being allocated to the development of profitable software to meet customer needs. Because companies desire to maximize their profits, an efficient allocation of these resources is necessary to minimize costs. This can be achieved by implementing a process model that best converts their resources to quality products. Agile software development is a relatively new framework aimed at reducing risk and production costs. It is based on iterative development and continuous feedback from all stakeholders throughout the development cycle. The switch to an agile process model from a traditional waterfall process model can reduce the risk associated with producing a large-scale software application by decreasing lead times and increasing team morale and productivity. My literature review and initial findings suggest that firms across industries can benefit from incorporating some degree of agility in their development process

An Empirical Study of Lead-Times in Incremental and Agile Software Development

Short lead-times are essential in order to have a first-move advantages and to be able to react on changes on a fast-paced market. Agile software development is a development paradigm that aims at being able to respond quickly to changes in customer needs. So far, to the best of our knowledge no empirical study has investigated lead-times with regard to different aspects (distribution between phases, difference of lead-time with regard to architecture dependencies, and size). However, in order to improve lead-times it is important to understand the behavior of lead-times. In this study the lead-times of a large-scale company employing incremental and agile practices are analyzed. The analysis focuses on 12 systems at Ericsson AB, Sweden