Agile Practices

Dear Colleagues,

2011 sees the 10^th anniversary of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. During that decade, agile practices have moved firmly into the mainstream, but there are still many questions to be answered and many innovations to be explored. The agile approach to information systems building encompasses many different activities and artefacts, including project management, software development tools and techniques and organisational re-engineering, and these aspects interact in complex and challenging ways. The popularity of hybrid approaches to agile development, for example the common pairing of Scrum and XP, raises questions about the similarities an differences between various agile methods, and the consequences of choosing particular methods, techniques, and combinations of these.  Practitioners and researchers view agile methods from many different perspectives, including management, testing, team dynamics and architecture, amongst many others. We continue to find new ways to practice agile development, for example with non iterative management approaches like Kanban  (revisiting the roots of agile in lean manufacturing), innovative test tools such as Infinitest, and efforts to scale agile into ever more complex and large scale systems development.

The special issue takes as its theme the challenges and opportunities of the second decade of the agile manifesto.  Now that agile practices are widespread, we have the opportunity to gather large scale, longitudinal empirical data, and to reflect and build on previous research and practice. There is already a long tradition of international conferences that have revealed the work of the agile community, for example the Agile series, presented by the Agile Alliance and with a strong industry flavour, and the XP series, which tends to encompass both industry and academia.  There are also a number of journals, both commercial and academic, that have published material related to agile development. This gives us a rich background of research and experience literature from which to build new ideas, theories and studies that can take our understanding of agile forward and increase the effectiveness of agile practices as we move into the next decade of the agile age.

Dr. David Parsons
Guest Editor