Challenges of Agile Development and Implementation in a Developing Country: A Zambia Case Study

Abstract

Agile development is a software development process that advocates adaptive planning, early delivery, evolutionary development and continuous betterment and supports rapid and flexible response to change. The purpose of Agile development is minimize project failure through customer interactions and responding to change. However, Agile development is vulnerable to failure because of a number of factors and these factors can be categorized under four dimensions, namely; organizational, people, process and technical. This paper reports the result of a study aimed at identifying factors that influence success and/or failure of Agile development in a developing country, Zambia. A multiple case study approach and grounded theory approach was used for this case study. The study shows that there are challenges that are unique to developing countries and therefore measures should be developed to address these unique problems when implementing Agile projects in developing countries.