Can Agile, Lean and ITIL Coexist?

2. Literature Review And Theoretical Framework

IT departments need to deliver business value faster. Traditional IT projects that follow waterfall method may take six months to a year to complete a software project (Rahman et al. 2011). Taking longer time before realizing business value is considered a major limitation and inefficiency of the waterfall method. Technologies used in providing IT capabilities change very fast. With the waterfall method, business organizations may find technology and applications delivered by IT projects to be old, inefficient or no longer serving the business purpose. To overcome the limitations of waterfall method serving projects, IT organizations and developer communities have come up with agile and lean software development methodologies.

Agile and Lean software development methodologies emerged early in the 21st century. When IT projects are implemented within a short time, they provide customers with faster turnaround between idea and solution. Waterfall has been known to take such a long time the IT solution delivered had become obsolete before the project was implemented. Agile Development methodology came into picture to overcome the shortcomings and inefficiencies of traditional waterfall method (Abbas et al. 2008; Sommerville, 2010). Among the agile methods the most popular ones are Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum and Lean software development (Campanelli and Parreiras, 2015; Reliable Software Resources Inc. 2011).