When Agile Is Not Good Enough: an initial attempt at understanding how to make the right decision

Abstract: Particularly over the last ten years, Agile has attracted not only the praises of a broad range of enthusiast software developers, but also the criticism of others. Either way, adoption or rejection of Agile seems sometimes to be based more on a questionable understanding than on a critical, well-informed decision making process. In this paper, the dual nature of the above criticism is discussed, and the arguments against Agile have been classified within a critical taxonomy of risk factors. A decisional model and tool based on such taxonomy are consequently proposed for supporting software engineers and other stakeholders in the decision-making about whether or not to use Agile. The tool, which is freely available online, comes with a set of guidelines: its purpose is to facilitate the community of software developers to contribute to further assessing the potential and the criticalities of Agile Methods.