A remedy perspective for emerging antipatterns in agile software projects in small and medium enterprises

Agile manifesto transforms mindset of software development teams, with the purpose of enabling them to provide rapid deliveries. Lack of conceptual clarity in the agile theory leads to multi-faceted agile nature, with teams interpreting and implementing agile values variously. Team decisions present paramount importance in the agile setting, with poor decision making quality being a significant factor in causing failures of the software development projects. An antipattern emerges when a conventional solution generates negative consequences. The agile manifesto provides theory, which in practice may result into problems, thus creating antipatterns. In this research, implications of the agile manifesto were outlined based on its critical analysis, with focus on decision making as a pivotal challenge in the agile usage. Furthermore, empirical study revealed obstacles in the agile manifesto implementation. Consequently, collaboration, short-term thinking and lack of planning issues were found to be the most influencing decision making process. While agile methodology advocates continuous process and product improving, the conducted case study illustrates that decision making issues are hard to reveal by teams as they are restrained by their mindset state and tend to stick to decisions from the past experience. The refactoring for the decision making management in the agile software development has been developed based on a) the knowledge of quality issues in decision making, b) the software project management antipatterns, and c) “Theory W” paradigm for the effective project management. Understanding of agile manifesto challenges and quality issues in the agile usage is indispensable to increasing the projects’ success. Addressing the identified issues results in agile software development process quality improvement