Introducing Agile Development Practices from the Middle

Agile practices are widely discussed as a process that lends itself to green-field development. There is good documentation to support this and books on implementing agile given a new project. In an organization, implementing agile from the top down is generally accepted as the key to success. In the real world most development teams have some legacy product, and development managers make decisions on how development teams deliver software. This paper will look at introducing agile to an existing development team with a maturing product. The problems of the development team, selling the idea to upper management, communication to customers and delivery will be discussed. The implementation of agile practices, what was done, how it was done and next steps in implementation are the focus of this paper.