Small, lightweight, closed-loop development processes

2. Examine effects of using agile methods for creating Internet products on customer satisfaction and firm performance • Agile methods are informal, lightweight, and fast moving management approaches for creating Internet products • Characterized by early customer involvement, flexible processes, iterative releases, and self organizing teams • Traditional methods are formal, heavyweight, and slow moving approaches for creating mainframe software • Characterized by formal project plans, rigid processes, voluminous documentation, and firm requirements • Survey 400 managers to examine the links between agile methods, customer satisfaction, and firm performance • Results may help managers better understand the business effects of using agile methods

3. Small, lightweight, closed-loop development processes • Ideal for creating Internet products and services • Consist of • Soliciting informal customer needs • Quickly translating needs into working Internet products • Releasing beta versions of products to customers • Soliciting early customer feedback • Repeating the cycle as often as necessary • Created to combat the spread of traditional methods • SW-CMM, CMMI, ISO, IEEE, and DoD standards • Ideal for powerful rapid prototyping languages such as HTML and Java

4. Top 500 U.S. firms spend $140 billion annually on information technology • Much of the annual $400 billion U.S. defense budget is also spent on information technology • There are 250,000 information technology projects each year in the U.S. • As many as 72% (e.g., 180,000) of U.S. information technology projects fail or are failing each year • Two-thirds of U.S. information technology projects use agile methods to alleviate this high failure rate • $10 billion U.S. National Security Agency with nearly 3,000 programmers committed to the use of agile methods • Ultimately, managers need to know whether agile methods are linked to any measures of organizational performance

5. Is the use of agile methods for developing Internet products linked to customer satisfaction and firm performance?

6. Antecedents of agile methods go back 50 years (e.g., trust, self organizing teams, early customer involvement, etc.)

7. Examine links between agile methods for creating Internet products, customer satisfaction, and firm performance • Design. Quantitative survey research of 400 software managers • Measures. A nine construct survey instrument with 36 items (using a five point Likert scale) • Analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for internal reliability and convergent validity • Results. Testing of the 16 hypotheses and construction of the final structural path model • Timeline. 12 month study to develop final proposal, collect data, and defend dissertation

8. MIT Sloan School of Management • Microsoft from 1991 to 1995 • Qualitative scholarly study • Lacks a theoretical model and quantification • MIT Sloan School of Management • Netscape from 1995 to 1998 • Qualitative scholarly study • Lacks a theoretical model and quantification • Harvard Business School Study • 15 Internet firms from 1995 to 1998 • Quantitative scholarly study • Theoretical model, soft constructs, limited sample size

9. 32 major classes of software methods have emerged over the last 50 years (with hundreds of variations)

10. Findings. Links between use of agile methods, customer satisfaction, and firm performance • Contributions. One of the first comprehensive empirical studies of the use of agile methods • Implications. Empirical confirmation or disconfirmation of validity of using agile methods • Limitations. May not be generalizable to all industry, organization, product, and service types • Threats to validity. Reliability and validity of research instrument, sample size, and response rate • Future research. Effects of other factors such as virtual teams, tools, groupware, culture, etc. • Recommendations. Whether or not to use or study agile methods for developing Internet products