An Empirical Study of Lead-Times in Incremental and Agile Software Development

Short lead-times are essential in order to have a first-move advantages and to be able to react on changes on a fast-paced market. Agile software development is a development paradigm that aims at being able to respond quickly to changes in customer needs. So far, to the best of our knowledge no empirical study has investigated lead-times with regard to different aspects (distribution between phases, difference of lead-time with regard to architecture dependencies, and size). However, in order to improve lead-times it is important to understand the behavior of lead-times. In this study the lead-times of a large-scale company employing incremental and agile practices are analyzed. The analysis focuses on 12 systems at Ericsson AB, Sweden.To be published in springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14347-