Managing Software Development Efficiency - A Swedish experience of applying agile method at telia.se

Abstract

Background and problem: Due to rapid changing market conditions in the IT industry, companies within the software industry have to respond to constantly changing customer needs. Some organizations have implemented an agile approach to manage this difficulty. Many small and middle-sized firms have successfully implemented the agile methodology in software development, however larger organizations can face some challenges when implementing agile approach. Telia.se has recently implemented agile method in their software development and even though the approach implies positive changes in the software development efficiency, this field of study has lack of empirical evidence and need to be researched. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to gain better insight into agile software development and its software development efficiency at telia.se. This is carried out by a case study at telia.se where different criterions are examined in order to try to measure what the implementation of the agile approach has led to. Method: A case-study setting was chosen as research design. The empirical material has been collected through qualitative, semi-structured interviews with eight employees at telia.se. All interviews were made face-to-face. Afterwards, all material has been analyzed and compared to the theoretical background in order to be able to answer our research question. Results and conclusion: In this case study, the collected empirical material showed that the software development efficiency has increased since the implementation of agile methods at telia.se and permanent teams are one of the biggest contributions to this. There are several challenges and difficulties to implement agile software development in a larger organization, which must be taken into account.