"Doing" Agile versus "Being" Agile. Empirical Results from 250+ Projects
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In numerous occasions Agile practitioners have warned about the negative aspects of adopting Agile tools and techniques, without implementing the primary practices of Agile. They have coined this observation as "doing" Agile, but not "being" Agile. However such warnings are opinion-based, as Agile practitioners have provided little to no empirical evidence that supports their recommendations. We mine 150 open source software (OSS) and 123 proprietary projects to investigate if empirical evidence exists for the phenomenon: "doing" Agile, but not "being" Agile. In particular, we investigate if the Agile technique of continuous integration (CI) influences bug and issue resolution, as well as commit patterns. According to our empirical analysis, for OSS projects, we observe the expected benefits after CI adoption, i.e., more bugs are resolved, and more issues are resolved. However, for the proprietary projects, we cannot make similar observations. Furthermore, we observe proprietary projects to "do" Agile, but not "be" Agile, as these projects use CI tools, without implementing the primary Agile practices for example, making frequent commits. We recommend practitioners not to use Agile techniques such as CI, without adopting the necessary practices.
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