Abstract

Using agile methods for enterprise software development (ESD) remains contentious. Advocates of agile and plan-driven methods (i.e., waterfall) argue their respective cases with near evangelical zeal, and recent evidence indicates that waterfall (or some variant) remains a widely used approach. This controversy persists despite strong arguments by Boehm and Turner (2004) recommending a balanced software development approach combining aspects of agile and plandriven methods, aligned to pro-jects based on each project’s fit with agile vs. plan-driven “home ground” characteristics. In this re-search, we hypothesize that Boehm and Turner were fundamentally correct and that neither of the “pure” models will lead to the highest level of project success in all circumstances. This paper de-scribes a research project to study the impact of alignment with a flexible but simple agile vs. hybrid vs. plan-driven approach on ESD outcomes. The discussion includes: 1) Articulating the identifying characteristics of ESD, 2) distilling the essence of plan-driven vs. agile methods along two key dimen-sions, 3) explicating a hybrid method of software development using those dimensions, and 4) extend-ing Boehm and Turner’s “home grounds” model to better determine the optimal ESD approach. The discussion includes our planned research questions, data collection and analysis, and hypotheses.

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