Are we ready for Agile Development?

Abstract: In the rapidly changing market of today, companies need to be responsive and react quickly to changes in both their competitors’ behaviour but also to changes in their own technical environment. In this thesis I have examined the agile characteristics of a number of companies in Stockholm, with focus on three agile concepts; Scrum, eXtreme Programming and Test Driven Development. The work started off by a prestudy, in which I have identified the criteria that a company needs to fulfil in order to be considered agile. This resulted in four main categories of characteristics; Quality, Flexibility, Communication and Competence. After doing the prestudy, these characteristics were investigated through a combination of a quantitative study and a case study. While the results mostly lean towards agile behaviour rather than non agile, it was shown that a lot of work still remains, for instance regarding improvements in the communications area, and also in the way these companies apply the agile methodologies examined.