Agile Movement from IT Industry to Non-IT Industry: A Review and Analysis

Abstract

Software engineering is comparatively a new addition in the vocabulary of traditional engineering discipline. Being a late joiner, software engineering obtained many of its process foundation from traditional engineering domains. But the ever-changing business needs and the growing complexity that are required to be addressed in a software application, have kept software engineers on their toes to continuously improve the development process to meet and to manage the challenges in it. Agile project management has been the most significant development in IT industry to manage software development process that could deliver quality software product at an extremely high speed compared to any of the predecessor methods. The key abstraction of all the flavors of agile methods is adaptability towards change. This adaptability is achieved by the use of quality practices and practitioners in a closely integrated working environment that also involves the customers in the development process more than ever before. IT industry has acknowledged the significant success of the agile process and has been a buzz-word for a decade in the IT industry. The paper is built upon a comparative study of the application of Agile project management in both IT and non-IT industries. It further discusses the adaptability of agile methods and its potential to benefit the Non-IT industry in managing the quality of deliverables while maintaining high delivery speed. The discussion extends its boundaries to cover the reason for less acceptance of Agile process in non-IT industry and put forth an argument against the suitability of some of the success-factors in the case of non-IT industries, while they enabled a high acceptance of the Agile process in IT-industry.