Citation: Ghimire, D.; Charters, S.
The Impact of Agile Development
Practices on Project Outcomes.
Software 2022, 1, 265–275. https://
doi.org/10.3390/software1030012
Academic Editors: Sanjay Misra,
Robertas Damaševiˇcius and
Bharti Suri
Received: 12 July 2022
Accepted: 3 August 2022
Published: 5 August 2022
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Article
The Impact of Agile Development Practices on Project Outcomes
Dipendra Ghimire
1,2,
* and Stuart Charters
2
1
Department of Business and Digital Technologies, Ara Institute of Canterbury,
Christchurch 8011, New Zealand
2
School of Landscape Architecture, Lincoln University, Lincoln 7647, New Zealand
* Correspondence: dipendra.ghimire@ara.ac.nz
Abstract:
Agile software development methods were introduced to minimize problems faced using
traditional software development approaches. There are several Agile approaches used in developing
software projects, these include Scrum, Extreme programming and Kanban. An Agile approach
focuses on collaboration between customers and developers and encourages development teams to be
self-organizing. To achieve this there are different Agile practices teams choose to use in their projects.
Some teams only use one practice whilst others use a combination of practices. The most common
practices used are stand-ups, user stories, Burndown chart/Burnup chart, pair programming, Epic
and User stories. This paper reports on the analysis of the data collected from people involved in
Agile software development teams and identifies that the combination of practices in Agile software
development have an impact on the communication in the team, project requirements and project
priorities, with more practices being adopted correlating with better project outcomes.
Keywords: agile software development; teamwork; software factors
1. Introduction
Agile software development is a more flexible way to develop software compared
to a plan driven approach. This flexibility can be seen with the ability to change require-
ments in any phase of the software development cycle [
1
]. An Agile approach focuses
on collaboration between customers and developers and encourages development teams
to be self-organizing [
2
]. To achieve this there are several Agile practices that can be
used in projects. Agile practices improve formal and informal communication during
the software development process [
3
]. Some practices that impact on communication are
open office space, product backlog, sprint planning, iteration planning meetings, itera-
tion reviews, daily meetings, and iteration retrospectives [
4
,
5
]. However, a study from
Pikkarainen et.al [
6
] was mainly focused on the practices that are likely to have an impact
on the communication within the team. There is little evidence on how the combination of
different approaches and practices impact on the project completion time and the budget.
This indicates a need for investigating different approaches and practices used in Agile
projects. This study explores the different practices used in Agile software development
projects and impact of their combination on project outcomes.
This paper first summarizes the current research literature on Agile approaches and
practices, and then discusses the impact a combination of approaches and practices may
have on the project outcomes.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a brief back-
ground and summarizes related work in the area. Section 3 presents the study design.
Section 4 introduces the research methodology and explains the different steps used in
conducting this research. The findings of this study are presented in Section 5 followed by
the conclusion and suggestions for future research in Section 6.
Software 2022, 1, 265–275. https://doi.org/10.3390/software1030012 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/software
