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1. Introduction
More than a decade after the Agile Manifesto (Beck et al., 2001), “agile adoption” has become an established term in the agile software development community. Experiential knowledge about the process of introducing agile methodology is available for organizations that were previously focused on plan-driven methods and are now willing to shift towards agile methods. Nevertheless, surveys suggest that agile adoption is still a difficult process for the team and organization. Asking for the top barriers to agile adoption, a recent industrial survey (VersionOne, 2016) found that, aside from organizational reasons (the ability to change organizational culture, general organizational resistance), there is often resistance from management that prevents agile adoption (lack of management support, concerns about a loss of management control, management concerns about a lack of upfront planning). These barriers hint to the unspoken fact that the agile world has still failed to convince many managers to embrace agile methodology because they feared the loss of control. Considering that such managers are often organizationally responsible for agile initiatives, it is crucial to build a bridge to their management rationale for obtaining their budget approval.
To approve budget, sponsors (internal upper managers or external customers) must be convinced that agile methodology delivers quality software. To achieve the required software quality, agile methodology relies on test-driven development (TDD) (Beck, 2002). This, in turn, requires the investment into appropriate test frameworks. The sponsors, however, often reject investment in such frameworks because they do not see their business value. This devil’s circle cannot easily be broken and therefore poses a relevant challenge to engineering design. It is surprising that so far, both practitioners and academics have not succeeded in providing helpful guidance how to solve this problem systematically.
1.1 A new approach: user-centered design
To tackle this problem, the author followed a user-centered design approach (Vredenburg et al., 2002). This approach is also referred to as customer-centered design (Kumar and Whitney, 2007) or human-centered design (Giacomin, 2014). It has become an increasing topic of interest in engineering design research (Liu and Boyle, 2009) and agile methodology (Fox et al., 2008). The users in this problem are the potential sponsors, i.e. business people on different levels who manage a budget or influence budget decisions. They...