A Research Agenda for Extending Agile Practices In Software Development and Additional Task Domains

Abstract

This article is intended to serve as an introduction to this special issue on agile practices. In doing so, we briefly survey a number of key issues that are emerging in the application of agile practices to software development (SWD) and, similarly, examine recent work on extending knowledge about these practices to other task domains. We note that the extant literature on agile practices has been criticized for lacking a theoretical basis and comment on various ways that a theory orientation can enhance the accumulation of knowledge in this area. We also address issues that expand our current understanding of agile practices as they apply to non-SWD tasks. We present a framework for surfacing and discussing some of these emergent issues. We comment on the articles in this special issue and situate them within the research framework. We discuss some of the topics we think are likely to become influential as agile practices move outside the SWD domain and, finally, we present some summarizing observations.