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.
Evolving Intellectual
Structures in the Academic
Agile Discourse
The analysis of the agile-based academic
literature also indicated some specific
First Author Source Title TC CR
Sutherland (2007) HICSS 2007 Distributed scrum: agile project
management with outsourced
development teams
190 22
Coram (2005) 12th IEEE International
Conference and
Workshops ECBS’05
The impact of agile methods on
software project management
112 17
Fernandez (2008) Journal of Computer
Information Systems
Agile project management—agilism
versus traditional approaches
83 16
Leybourne (2009) International Journal
of Managing Projects
in Business
Improvisation and agile project
management: a comparative
consideration
29 16
McAvoy (2009) European Journal of
Information Systems
The role of project management in
ineffective decision making within
agile software development projects
45 10
TC 5 Times Cited, CR 5 Citations Received
Table 6: The top five most referenced academic agile project management publications.