University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.The innovative well-known agile methods offer many powerful agile software development practices and have received considerable attention from both practitioners as well as the research community. While many organizations are interested in adopting agile methods suitable to their local circumstances, there is little guidance available on how to do so. Organizations, especially on the large-scale, currently lack systematic support for adopting agile methods in their complex software development settings. To address this important issue, this research proposes an agile software solution framework (ASSF) to both assistance in the assessment of the capability of the organization or team and tailoring of agile method in order to support the systematic adoption and improvement of agility in both agile and, incidentally, non-agile software development environments - especially formal and large environments. The ASSF has been incrementally developed by the iterative application of build, review and adjust research activities, which is called here a “qualitative empirical” research method. The ASSF is intended for use by agile coaches and consultants as a comprehensive information guide. The ASSF has two main components: framework characteristics and lifecycle management. The framework characteristics component incorporates 10 main elements or attributes to describe the agile-hybrid software development methodologies: (1) people (2) process, (3) product, (4) tools, (5) agility, (6) abstraction, (7) business value, (8) policy (9) rules and (10) legal. The framework lifecycle management component specifies the stages, practices and resources in order to support the systematic adoption and improvement of agility. The framework stages refer to an agility adoption and improvement lifecycle, its practices refer to an agility adoption and improvement process, and its resources refer to models, templates and toolkit that can be used during the agility adoption and improvement process such as the contextual analysis model, a key agility indicators index, an agility adoption and improvement model, an agility adoption and improvement scorecard, and an agile toolkit. The components of this framework have been empirically analysed and reviewed by experts from industry as well as the research community, and updated based on the feedback received. The results of this research indicated that the proposed ASSF framework may be considered reasonable for a gradual successful transition or adoption of agile practices in formal and large software development environments
