Towards Understanding the Motivation of German Organizations to Apply Certain Software Development Methods

The motivation to apply and to integrate agile methods into established development processes can be seen all over the world. However, the motivation for applying agile methods is not well understood as different objectives are possible: some organizations address the constantly changing market and customer demands, others are doing “agile” as the presumed best practice. This publication aims towards a better understanding of the motivation to apply the chosen development methods in Germany. We present preliminary results based on the data collection of the “Hybrid dEveLopmENt Approaches in software systems development” (HELENA) study. Further, we exemplary look at the role of criticality for choosing agile or traditional development methods. The results indicate that the six development methods applied most in Germany are Scrum, Kanban, DevOps, Waterfall, V-Model, and Iterative Development. However, a particular method is not necessarily chosen due to a specific goal. This indicates that as future work other influencing factors, e.g., the criticality of the final product, need to be identified and taken into account for analysis.