Project Management Journal

began later with the increase of academic research as reflected by the new topics of the second period.

Our co-citation analysis for the first seven-year period (2001–2007) resulted in five factors. The number of articles constituting these factors varies and is in some cases relatively low; however, all of the articles are consistently co-cited, suggesting a generally accepted intellectual structure. The topics that we uncovered explore the improvement of software productivity at the developer level (XP and test-driven development), the introduction and application of agile-related methods and process models within organizations (agile adoption and empirical analysis of agile), and engineering perspectives on developing and modifying software methods (method engineering). For the first period we could not identify a distinct discussion of project management– related topics. Within that time period we could identify several practitioner-based publications discussing agile project management (Runeson, 2005; Augustine, Payne, Sencindiver, & Woodcock, 2005; Ceschi, Sillitti, Succi, & Panfilis, 2005) but a distinct topic in the academic discourse integrating project management–related concepts into agile software development did not evolve.

The second seven-year period (2008–2014) is characterized by a strong growth of agile-related academic research that is reflected in more than 100 co-cited articles. The co-citation analysis revealed nine distinct factors. The main focus of the discourse remains on the introduction and implementation of new agile models ( test-driven development, XP, and Scrum). We also identified a distinct discourse of project management–related topics (see Factor 2-2). Of the nine factors, it is also the second strongest and takes a central role as it viewed in the network plot (see Figure 3). Other topics are more practice oriented, such as the use of agile methods in the global software development context (Holmström et al., 2006).

The Role of Project
Management in the
Academic Agile Discourse

Project management research is becoming increasingly relevant to the agile discourse. Despite the fact that several authors refer to the management of software projects as agile project management (Augustine et al., 2005; Sutherland et al., 2007; Fernandez & Fernandez,

2008), it is surprising that we were not able to identify a distinct topic during the first time period. This clearly changed for the second period in which we identified 25 academic articles exploring the interaction between agile software development and project management concepts. These articles largely analyze the management challenges using agile methods (Sutherland et al., 2007; Korkala

& Abrahamsson, 2007; Leybourne, 2009;

Turk et al., 2005; Maruping et al., 2009;

Dybå & Dingsøyr, 2008), and the integration of agile methods with existing traditional project management standards and processes (Abrahamsson et al., 2003; Coram & Bohner, 2005; McAvoy et al., 2009; Harris et al., 2009; Karlström et al., 2006). Another group of publications analyzes the conceptual differences between agile and plan–driven methods (Abrahamsson et al., 2003; Boehm, 1988;

Dybå et al., 2008; Sharp et al., 2008).

Boehm and Turner (2004) discuss the problems involved in integrating agile and plan-driven methods and provide a “hybrid model” to balance agility with existing software project management standards.

A specific analysis of agile project management publications reveals that the most frequently cited articles (Table 6) were primarily published in software and computer science journals; only one on the list was published in a management journal. All articles discuss consequences of agile for traditional software project management.

In sum, the agile discourse largely focuses on integrating agile principles into the management of software development projects (Nerur, Mahapatra, & Mangalaraj, 2005; Leybourne, 2009). The reverse direction is rarely considered; in other words, project management models have solely served as a subject of change by agile methods, yet project management research has not influenced the development and analysis of agile methods.