Getting agile methods to work for cordys global software product development

Abstract

Getting agile methods to work in global software development is a potentially rewarding but challenging task. Agile methods are relatively young and still maturing. The application to globally distributed projects is in its early stages. Various guidelines on how to apply and sometimes adapt agile methods have been proposed. However, systematic literature reviews reveal that detailed evaluative studies are scarce and limited to small and medium sized projects. This study presents a framework that integrates best practices of adapting and applying agile methods reported in the literature. The framework is applied to analyze the experiences of global software product development company Cordys in a seven year longitudinal case study. Both the framework and the experiences of Cordys documented in this paper will be of value to other larger projects that aim to he successful in applying agile in globally distributed projects.