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Which Challenges Do Exist With Agile Culture in Practice?

Published: 07 June 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Context: In agile transformations there are many challenges. One very important but less considered and treated in research are cultural challenges associated with an agile mindset. Although research shows that cultural clashes and general organizational resistance to change are part of the most significant agile adoption barriers. Objective: We identify challenges that arise from the interplay between agile culture and organizational culture. In doing so, we tackle this field and come up with important contributions for further research regarding a problem that practitioners face today. Method: This is done with a mixed-method research approach. First, we gathered qualitative data among our network of agile practitioners and derived in sum 15 challenges with agile culture. Then, we conducted quantitative data by means of a questionnaire study with 92 participants. Results: We identified 7 key challenges out of the 15 challenges with agile culture. These key challenges refer to the technical agility (doing agile) and the cultural agility (being agile). The results are presented in a conceptual model. Conclusion: Based on our results, we started deriving future work aspects to do more detailed research on the topic of cultural challenges while transitioning or using agile methods in software development and beyond.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '23: Proceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
March 2023
1932 pages
ISBN:9781450395175
DOI:10.1145/3555776
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 07 June 2023

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Author Tags

  1. agile software development
  2. agile culture
  3. agile mindset
  4. organizational culture
  5. challenges

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  • (2025)Understanding Agile Transformation With Critical Systems Heuristics in Soft Systems Methodology: A Study Case in Oil and Gas Company OperationSystems Research and Behavioral Science10.1002/sres.3137Online publication date: 13-Feb-2025
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