Continuous improvement in agile development practice: The case of value and non-value adding activities

Agile development has positive attitudes towards continuously improving work practices of IT professionals and the quality of the software. This study focuses on value adding activities such as user involvement and gathering metrics and non-value adding activities, such as correcting defects. Interviews were conducted with 10 IT professionals working with agile development in Iceland. Results show that IT professionals emphasise communication with users both through direct contact and using email, but they rarely use metrics to make improvements measurable. The most serious non-value adding activities are: partially done work, delays and defects. The core reason is that long lists of defects in the projects exist, which means that the software is partially done and the defects cause delays in the process. There are efforts to reduce non-value adding activities in the process, but IT professionals are still confronted with problems attributed to miscommunication and the impediments by the external environment. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014.