Characteristics and Challenges of Agile Software Development Adoption in Brazilian Government

Abstract

Governments worldwide have been working to provide better digital services to citizens. In Brazil, this initiative is ongoing since the 2000's with the aim create better digital solutions that provide access to government information, improvements in public services, and increase social participation. One of the strategies for developing digital solutions -i.e. software solutions -is the adoption of agile software development (ASD) methods, which are forms of software processes that enable delivering working software in a timely manner to respond to customer needs. While industry surveys are performed annually to understand ASD adoption in companies, little is known about the adoption of ASD in Brazilian government organizations and which are the challenges faced by these organizations. The goal of this study is thus to describe agile software development adoption in the Brazilian public sector, by showing the characteristics for adoption and challenges. We conducted a survey with practitioners of government-based organizations in Brazil and statistically analyzed data. Out of the 167 responses, we learned that ASD projects are mostly successful and, on their majority, they are conducted combined with other software development approaches. Also, accelerating product delivery and increasing productivity are ranked as the main reasons for agile adoption, followed by cultural change and resistance to change as the main challenges still faced by Brazilian government IT organizations in the use of ASD.

Barriers of Agile Requirements Engineering in the Public Sector: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Public sector organizations encounter both common challenges faced by private sector entities and unique hurdles inherent to their specific context. These obstacles encompass an organizational culture that is often incompatible with Agile principles due to the presence of hierarchical and bureaucratic structures, limited familiarity with Agile methodologies, and a reliance on rigid and prescriptive approaches (Fontana & Marczak, 2020;Mohagheghi & Lassenius, 2021). Rizkiyah et al (2020) conducted a study on the issue of practical requirements within an unsuccessful Agile project on a government agency in order to prevent similar setbacks in the future.…”

“…The primary drivers for adopting Agile practices within Brazilian government IT organizations are the desire to expedite product delivery and enhance productivity. However, significant challenges persist, including the need for cultural transformation and overcoming resistance to change (Fontana & Marczak, 2020).…”

“…QGS provides guidance on formulating the essential keywords and their corresponding alternatives (Akbar et al, 2020;Kitchenham & Brereton, 2013). In the present study, two specific articles (Fontana & Marczak, 2020;Khan et al, 2021) have been selected as QGS references, serving as a foundation for constructing the search string.…”

“…Over the past few years, the Agile approach has been adopted more widely in the private sector (Cico et al, 2021) and the public sector (Fontana & Marczak, 2020). This trend can be attributed to the numerous advantages associated with an Agile approach, such as increasing productivity and efficiency (Lagerberg et al, 2013;Rasheed et al, 2021), adaptability, and short time-to-market (Mishra et al, 2021), significant accelerating the speed of change, and forces the organization to respond swiftly to various unexpected challenges and opportunities with limited information and in conditions of considerable uncertainty (Vaia et al, 2022).…”

The relation between project team conflict and user resistance in software projects

“…The gains of new software are dependent on the implementation success and adoption by key stakeholders [ 1 , 2 ]. Resistance to change, sometimes referred to more specifically as user resistance or more generally as stakeholder resistance [ 3 , 4 ], is among the most significant barriers to the adoption of new software in various contexts, such as healthcare [ 4 – 7 ], government services [ 8 ], supply chain [ 9 ], human resources [ 10 ], decision support [ 11 ], knowledge sharing [ 12 ], information security [ 13 , 14 ], IT services [ 15 ] and software development [ 16 ], and so forth.…”