How the Pharmaceutical Industry and Agile Software Development Methods Conflict: A Systematic Literature Review

Software development projects in the context of the pharmaceutical industry are highly restricted. Innovation in terms of process changes within the practice of software development has to manoeuvre though the regulatory wilderness of legislation and industry standards. 49 articles have been selected using the Systematic Literature Review method to evaluate the maturity of this field of research. Agile methods conflict with the generally accepted software development methods within the pharmaceutical industry. Even the acquired set of literature disseminate about a various amount of topics regarding to the conflict of agile methods and the pharmaceutical industry. This research concludes that the appliance of existing agile methods in the pharmaceutical industry is relatively non-existent, possibly causing software development projects to exceed budgets.