Influence of software product management maturity on usage of artefacts in agile software development

Abstract

Context: Agile software development (ASD) uses ‘agile’ artefacts such as user stories and product backlogs as well as ‘non-agile’ artefacts, for instance designs and test plans. Rationales for incorporating especially non-agile artefacts by an agile team mainly remain unknown territory. Goal: We start off to explore influences on artefacts usage, and state our research question as: To what extent does maturity relate to the usage of artefacts in ASD in software product organizations? Method: In our multiple case study 14 software product organizations were visited where software product management maturity was rated and their artefacts usage listed. Results: We found maturity to be negatively correlated with the non-agile/all artefacts ratio. In other words, the more mature software product management is, the fewer non-agile artefacts are used in ASD. Conclusions: This suggests that an organizational factor influences an agile team in its artefacts usage, contradictory to the concept of self-organizing agile teams.