Software process improvement with agile practices in a large telecom company

Besides the promise of rapid and efficient software development, agile methods are well-appreciated for boosting communication and motivation of development teams. However, they are not practical "as such" in large organizations, especially because of the well-established, rigid processes in the organizations. In this paper, we present a case study where a few agile practices were injected into the software process of a large organization in order to pilot pair programming and improve the motivation and competence build-up. The selected agile practices were pair programming, the planning game and collective code ownership. We show how we adjust these practices in order to integrate them into the existing software process of the company in the context of a real software project.