Moving from Waterfall to Agile: Perspectives from IT Portuguese Companies

Abstract

This study investigates the main motivations, difficulties and good practices in the migration process of software development models from Waterfall to Agile experienced by IT Portuguese companies. For that, we adopted a quantitative methodology based on multiple case studies that allowed us to explore five research questions. In a first step, we propose to identify the main reasons that motivate the companies to adopt Agile development processes and we intend to characterize this migration process. We also explore a set of good practices that can be followed in this migration process and we suggest a set of measures that can be used to assess the success of projects in an Agile environment. Finally, we explore the organizational and management impacts with the introduction of Agile processes.