A Basic Model to Analyze the Effective Area for Agile Development in IT Projects

Abstract

Existing literature has claimed the need of theoretical research regarding the Agile development method (Agile), since project success or failure can be easily impacted if Agile is not introduced properly. While Agile can enable us to effectively find more upfront symptoms of the rework due to the ambiguous requirements and changes, overhead workload, such as planning and coordination activities, for iterative developments should be reduced. This paper proposes a fundamental mathematical model to illustrate the effective area of Agile by analyzing the reduction of possible rework workload and possible overhead workload in a previous study. Our numerical experiments show that the bigger the reduction rate of the probability of rework in each iteration, the wider the effective area of Agile is. However, they also indicate that the effective area should be impacted more significantly by the overhead workload.