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Agile Project Management

Article · June 2005

DOI: 10.1007/11499053_47

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Rashina Hoda James Noble

University of Auckland Victoria University of Wellington
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 Agile Project Management
Rashina Hoda Prof. James Noble Dr. Stuart Marshall
Victoria University of Wellington Victoria University of Wellington Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington Wellington Wellington
New Zealand New Zealand New Zealand
+64 4 463 6778 +64 4 463 6736 +64 4 463 6730
hodarash@mcs.vuw.ac.nz kjx@mcs.vuw.ac.nz stuart.marshall@mcs.vuw.ac.nz

ABSTRACT In this new setup, we find three major areas of concern and
As agile software development gains awareness and popularity wish to explore them as the main aims of our research.
in the software industry, it also continues to capture the interest
of the research community. There are several topics within the
1.1 Aim of the Research
The objective of the research is to investigate 'Agile Project
agile software development area that demand deeper
Management' within companies, practitioners, or mentors using
understanding and research. One such topic is 'Agile Project
agile software methodologies such as XP, Scrum, Crystal etc.
Management' which relates to the management of software
The investigation is expected to delve into the following sub-
projects that are developed using various agile frameworks such
topics, and closely examine:
as eXtreme Programming (XP) and Scrum.

The role of the project manager in an agile project.
This paper outlines proposed research on agile project
management. In particular we hope to explore the role of the
The process and problems of transitioning into an
project manager, the process and problems of transitioning into agile framework.
an agile framework, and the management of outsourced agile
projects.
Management of off-shored or outsourced agile
software projects.
Categories & Subject Descriptors:
K.6.1 Project and People Management: Management 2. MOTIVATION
techniques Looking specifically at the aims of our research above, we
begin to formulate some of the most obvious questions
K.6.3 Software Management: Software development/process
surrounding these issues. For instance, it will be interesting to
explore the kinds of pressure the manager faces in trying to
General Terms bring the agile principles to life. With agile processes
Management, Experimentation, Human Factors, Theory. promoting the concept of 'self-directed teams' [1], is there room
for the conventional project manager or does this role also need
Keywords to evolve to suit the principles of the new paradigm? How are
Agile Methodologies, Agile Project Management, Outsourcing the agile manager roles different from the traditional manager
or Off-shoring, Project Manager, Transitioning. roles?

How do organizations adapt to a radically new framework such

1. INTRODUCTION as agile? Does it merely take up gradation of technical skills or
Agile development methodologies are becoming popular in the a complete change in outlook and the way the organization
industry [1] and consequently companies and practitioners are works?
faced with the challenge of understanding and embracing this
new paradigm. They are eager to know what it is, how it works, Finally, as outsourcing becomes a common practice, we are
and what does it take to make it work. Companies or faced with other challenging questions. How difficult is agile
practitioners interested in adopting agile frameworks are faced project management for outsourced or off-shored projects?
with the challenge of making the transition. Traditional roles Does communication become a prime concern or does
are challenged and processes are revamped to reflect the new management suffer at the hands of trying to synchronize
development methodologies. distributed teams spanning different continents and time zones?
Is agility thrust upon the teams that the projects are outsourced
to by their parent companies or do they freely choose to follow
agile processes?

These are the issues we hope to investigate in our case studies.

For the rest of the paper, we first explain the concepts of agile
methodologies like XP and Scrum and the basics of grounded
This paper was published in the proceedings of the New Zealand theory as a qualitative research method. Then we discuss the
Computer Science Research Student Conference 2008. Copyright is held issues surrounding agile project management. This is followed
by the author/owner(s). by planned road map of the research. And finally we present the
conclusion.

NZCSRSC 2008, April 2008, Christchurch, New Zealand.

 Agile Project Management 219

3. BACKGROUND Systems Development Method (DSDM), and Adaptive

The research focuses on agile methods like eXtreme Software Development. For our research purposes we
Programming (XP) and Scrum and use grounded theory as a concentrate on the more popular XP and Scrum flavours.
qualitative research method. Before we describe the details of 3.1.1 eXtreme Programming (XP)
the proposed research, we discuss these concepts in more detail.
XP was created by Kent Beck [3], who compiled a collection of
good practices and took them to the extreme. Its mostly targeted
3.1 Agile Methods at small to medium sized projects and has gained rapid
Agile methodologies follow iterative and incremental style of acceptance and practice over the world.
development that dynamically adjusts to changing requirements
and enables better risk management. The four basic principles The five XP values are communication, simplicity, feedback,
of agile as defined by the Agile manifesto [2] are: courage, and respect. Its hallmark principles are planning game,
small releases, metaphors, simple design, refactoring, pair

individuals and interactions over process and tools, programming, testing, collective ownership, 40-hour work

working software over comprehensive week, on-site customer, coding standards, and continuous
documentation, integration.

customer collaboration over contract negotiation,

responding to change over following a plan. Customers provide the specification of required functionalities
in the form of user stories [4]. They are written concisely in
There are differences between the traditional ways of software non-technical formats and focus on the needs of the user
development and the agile style of working. Some of the avoiding any design details. They help the developers to
prominent ones are highlighted in Table 1. estimate the implementation time and go into the release
planning.

Table 1. Comparative Chart – Traditional vs. Agile Each short iteration achieves a handful of tasks and its
Categories Traditional Agile recommended that a steady project velocity be maintained.
Developers work in pairs and perform unit tests and integrate
Development Model Traditional Iterative code often. The customer is ideally available on-site and is
closely involved in the development through rapid feedback.
Focus Process People Refactoring the code to renew obsolete designs and remove
redundancy allows for a higher quality product to be produced.
Management Controlling Facilitating Testing is an important part and is undertaken frequently in
form of unit tests and acceptance test. Finally lengthy
Customer Requirements On-site and documentation is avoided and optimization is left till last.
involvement gathering and constantly involved
delivery phases 3.1.2 Scrum
Scrum is another agile development methodology developed by
Developers Work individually Collaborative or in Jeff Sutherland and formalized by Ken Schwaber.
within teams pairs
The roles involved in this process are Product Owner, Scrum
Technology Any Mostly Object Master, and the team. The Product Owner is responsible for
Oriented maintaining the correct business perspective. The Scrum Master
works with the Product Owner and facilitates the team. The
Product Features All included Most important first
team should contains seven (plus/minus two) members.
Testing End of Iterative and/or
Activities include sprint planning, sprint review, and scrum
development cycle Drives code
meeting. A sprint is usually 2 to 4 weeks of development time
Documentation Thorough Only when needed where a set of selected stories are worked on. The sprint review
reviews the previous sprint in terms of tasks achieved and the
next sprint details are defined. The Scrum Master leads a daily
15 minutes meeting where each member briefly describes their
In real life development, its common to experience frequent tasks and concerns.
change requests in customer requirements. The traditional
forms of development left little scope of refactoring to address The artifacts produced are named Product Backlog, Sprint
this need. They adopt the traditional model of development Backlog, and Burndown Chart. The product backlog is a list of
which unrealistically assumes that the customer requirements product features prioritized by value delivered to the customer
remain fixed over the entire length of the project. Agile [5] and is maintained by the Product Owner. The sprint backlog
methodologies on the other hand are focused towards customer refers to the development tasks that are needed in order to
satisfaction and therefore allow for changes through iterative implement a feature and is a subset of the product backlog. The
style of development where only needed functionalities are burndown chart shows the total work remaining in a sprint.
focused on. Since only a hand full of tasks are achieved in one 3.2 Research Method – Grounded
iteration, its easier to modify functionalities as needed and
manage the associated risks better.
Theory
We intend to make use of Grounded Theory – a qualitative
research method which was originally developed by Glaser and
There are many versions of agile methodologies such as
Strauss [6].
Crystal, Feature Driven Development (FDD), Dynamic
220 R. Hoda, J. Noble, and S. Marshall

The role of the project manager has undergone considerable

The major components of Qualitative Research [7] are: changes with the evolution of agile methodologies. While
1. the data, which can be derived from different sources, Scrum has introduced the Product Owner and Scrum Master,
interviews and observations being the most common. XP has invented the roles tracker or coach.
2. the different analytic or interpretive procedures that
are used to arrive at theories. Sanjiv Augustine and Susan Woodcock explore the role of the
3. written and verbal report project manager and propose the concept of visionary leader as
opposed to an uninspired taskmaster.[1] While traditional
As Strauss and Corbin note in their book on grounded theory management was viewed as governing and commanding,
[7], “A grounded theory is one that is inductively derived from experienced agile project managers are preaching of 'self-
the study of the phenomenon it represents. That is, it is directed teams' with 'light touch' leadership[1]. Similar
discovered, developed, and provisionally verified through sentiments are resonated by Mary Poppendieck in a panel
systematic data collection and analysis of data pertaining to discussion titled Agile Management – An Oxymoron? [8] where
that phenomenon.” Poppendieck notes “I distinguish management tasks – getting
the maximum value from the dollar – from leadership tasks –
According to grounded theorists, research questions may be helping people to excel. Leaders are required. Managers are
derived from suggested or assigned research problems, optional.” It will be interesting to observe the new face of
technical literature, and personal and professional experience. project managers in an agile setting through the course of this
In our case it was a combination of all of these factors that led research. We plan to interview managers about their perceived
to the finalization of our research topic. roles and how different do they find it from the traditional
manager roles.
As grounded theory suggested, we must not bind ourselves to
any preconceived notions and allow important categories to Our research also aims to focus on the process and problems of
emerge through the iterations of interviews. Therefore, we plan transitioning into an agile framework. Experienced
to proceed by conducting a pilot study to understand the real practitioners suggest having a checklist to assess the company's
issues within the agile project management area and then need and readiness for embracing the agile wave. In a paper by
improve our list of questions to focus more on the important Nerur et al. from the University of Arlington, Texas [9] various
categories in succeeding interviews. issues related to transitioning into an agile environment are
mentioned. They are broadly divided into people-related,
Researchers adopt different methods of coding to handle the process-related, and technological issues.
large amounts of raw data extracted from the interviews and
observations. They need to exhibit a personal quality called Finally, the last item on our research agenda is exploring the
'theoretical sensitivity' in order to derive meaning from the management of outsourced or off-shored agile projects. We
mountains of data gathered. hope to contact and collaborate with companies in India that
deal with off-shored agile projects. We find that previous
'Theoretical Sensitivity' is defined as “the ability to recognize research on outsourcing in an agile environment suggests that
what is important in data and to give it meaning. It comes from there is a co-relation worth exploring. In a paper titled When
being well grounded in the technical literature as well as from XP Met Outsourcing [10], the researchers note that they “saw a
professional and personal experience.” [7] strong awareness of the interactions between outsourcing
arrangements and the XP process”. Sutherland et al.[11] note
After the split of ideologies occurred between Glaser and in their recent paper that in order to ensure success “outsourced
Strauss (founders of the Grounded Theory) different views on teams must be highly skilled Agile teams and project
'coding paradigms' emerged. According to Strauss, various implementation must enforce geographic transparency with
methods of data analysis can be employed in order to convert cross-functional teams at remote sites fully integrated with
the collected data into theories. Some of these are Open cross-functional teams at the primary site.” We will aim
Coding, Axial Coding, and Selective Coding. Glaser maintains explore these interesting angles further in our case studies.
“all is data” and requires researchers to treat all information, Having done some initial reading and exploring the literature
whether derived from interviews, observations, surveys, or available on agile project management, we now chart out our
statistical analysis etc to be treated as data. It will take more research road map.
exploration of the two, Glaserian and Straussian, paradigms
before we can decide on which one to follow. 5. THE PROPOSED RESEARCH –
Road Map
Now that we have explained the basic paradigms involved in
our research, lets explore the topic 'agile project management' in
greater detail.
5.1 Finding Agile Practitioners
After gaining Human Ethics Committee approval, the next
important and challenging part of the research process is
4. AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT finding interested parties for interviews and observations. We
Project management is an integral and indispensable part of any searched for agile companies, groups, and organizations on the
software development process. Managing the teams, customer Internet and contacted them with details of our research. We
relationships, cost reduction, risk management, maintaining also signed up on agile mailing lists and joined user groups of
project time line and budget constitute the crux of project agile enthusiasts. We also gained some contacts in the New
management. Although these basic tasks remain the same, their Zealand agile community and will follow them up for
execution details are slightly different for each agile framework. possibilities of interviews. Searching through different avenues,
What is drastically different- is the way of thinking. we are planning to build a set of practitioners and companies
that can be representative of the larger agile community. We
 Agile Project Management 221

must however acknowledge that our representative set of 7. REFERENCES

practitioners and companies is confined to those that exhibit [1] Augustine, S., Payne, B., Sencindiver, F., and Woodcock,
their interest in participation. S. 2005. Agile project management: steering from the
edges. Commun. ACM 48, 12 (Dec. 2005), 85-89.
5.2 Interviews [2] http://agilemanifesto.org/ (Dec. 2007)
In order to gather information regarding the topic, we will
conduct interviews in New Zealand and India. We plan to [3] Kent Beck, Extreme programming explained: embrace
follow projects averaging between 6 to 12 months and hold change, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc.,
interviews and observations at important milestones of the Boston, MA, 1999
projects or at regular intervals mutually agreed upon by the [4] http://extremeprogramming.org/ (Dec. 2007)
interviewees. This is so we can get a complete picture of agile
[5] http://www.scrumalliance.org/view/scrum_framework (as
project management through the entire life cycle of different
of Dec. 2007)
projects.
[6] Strauss, Anselm and Glaser, Barney (1967). The Discovery
5.3 Data Collection of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research.
The data collected will be analyzed as per the principles of Chicago: Adline.
grounded theory.. All materials collected will be stored in a [7] Strauss, Anselm and Corbin, Juliet (1990). Basics of
secure and confidential way and will be destroyed at the Qualitative Research Grounded Theory Procedures and
completion of the research. Techniques. Sage Publications.
5.4 Building the Theory [8] Anderson, L., Alleman, G. B., Beck, K., Blotner, J.,
The research will use qualitative analysis methods named Cunningham, W., Poppendieck, M., and Wirfs-Brock, R.
Grounded Theory to gather valuable data regarding various 2003. Agile management - an oxymoron?: who needs
issues in Agile Project Management in New Zealand and India. managers anyway? OOPSLA '03. ACM, New York, NY,
275-277.
As we gather more data from our case studies, we'll need to
undertake in-depth analysis of all the information and follow [9] Nerur, S., Mahapatra, R., and Mangalaraj, G. 2005.
the systematic coding procedures to arrive at theories. We will Challenges of migrating to agile methodologies. Commun.
also need to revisit the data time and again in order to validate ACM 48, 5 (May. 2005), 72-78.
the emerging theories against the raw information and carefully [10] Martin, A., Biddle, R., and Noble, J. (2004), When XP
avoid any biases or misinterpretations. Met Outsourcing, Jutta Eckstein & Hubert Baumeister
(Ed.)
6. CONCLUSION - The Future is Agile [11] Sutherland, J., Viktorov, A., Blount, J., and Puntikov, N.
There is no lack of interest in the research community and the 2007. Distributed Scrum: Agile Project Management with
software industry for agile processes, as is evident from the Outsourced Development Teams (January 03 - 06, 2007).
numerous research being conducted on agile practices and HICSS. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 274a.
from the growing awareness of agile methodologies in the [12] Agile Software Community of India, ASCI. DOI=
industry. This gives us the motivation and encouragement to http://agileindia.org/ ( Dec. 2007)
explore another important issue in the agile sphere – Agile
Project Management, one that demands greater understanding.
Our research hopes to explore three specific issues, namely
process and problems of transitioning into an agile framework,
role of the agile project manager, and management of
outsourced agile projects and derive theory to comment on the
successful practices in all of these areas.
The agile community in New Zealand is respectable in size but
difficult to discover and follow, largely because of the lack of a
central organization or banner that could cover the regional
interests. We are aware of efforts being directed to rectify this
problem.

The agile community in India seems to be vast and very

proactive. It was also encouraging to see their interest and
willingness to participate in our research. Societies such as
Agile Software Community of India or ASCI [12] are working
to support and propagate agile practices in the India software
industry and academia.

Finally, growing number of companies are adopting agile ways

of development in New Zealand, India, and rest of the world.
We must develop deeper knowledge and comprehension of the
critical issues such as agile project management, if this interest
and growth of the agile methodologies is to be sustained. Our
proposed research is a step in that direction.