The Right Degree of Agility in Rich Processes

Many companies that change their development process to agile later adapt these methods to their specific needs, take a step back to traditional processes, or do not continue their agile initiative. Particularly in light of the huge diversity of domains from information systems to embedded systems, it is necessary to find the right degree of agility for each context. Our goal is to describe how agility can be integrated into rich processes. Bringing the advantages of these two organizational worlds together should result in a useful, pragmatic, and feasible solution. This integration can be performed using two different approaches: revolutionary and evolutionary. In the revolutionary approach, an agile method is introduced to replace the current development process. In the evolutionary approach, the existing process is enhanced with appropriate and beneficial agile aspects. Both of these approaches have advantages for specific domains or contexts. After comparing the two approaches and related implementations of the revolutionary approach, this chapter focuses on the integration of agile practices, a specific evolutionary approach, due to the lack of existing research. With our comparison on the basis of the advantages and disadvantages of these two integration approaches, their detailed description, and some related implementations, we provide a foundation for further investigation in the field of combining agile and rich processes to find the right degree of agility.