Content area
Full Text
1. Introduction and motivation
Various approaches already exist for business process improvement (BPI). Some of them have been around for a long time, while others were not developed until this decade. On the one hand, they are the main pillars of BPI like Kaizen (Masaaki, 1986), Six Sigma (Harry, 1988) or Lean (Womack et al., 1997) and, on the other hand, more recent methods such as inverse workflow (Sauer et al., 2011) or practitioner-led rapid cycle change (Powell et al., 2009). However, all these approaches try to improve business processes for different purposes. The aims of Lean, for example, are cost reduction, productivity, organization and resource utilization, and waste reduction (Antony, 2012).
This work also aims at improving business processes but by making use of knowledge from computer science rather than business administration. In the field of software engineering, we focus on agile software development and all its aspects, such as agile principles (The Agile Alliance, 2001), agile methods, e.g. Scrum (Sutherland and Schwaber, 2016), Scaling Agile Frameworks, like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework, 2015), and agile practices, e.g. stand-up meetings (Sutherland and Schwaber, 2016). Agile became popular around 2001 (The Agile Alliance, 2001) and is now the most commonly used approach for software development. With all their aspects, agile development processes for software engineering have shown to improve quality, customer collaboration, efficiency and much more (VersionOne, 2018; Schmitt and Diebold, 2016).
The motivation for this systematic literature review (SLR) was to integrate agile into a different field than software engineering, namely into the field of economics and business processes. The reason for this is that we believe that the usage of agile goes far beyond software development processes. Not only software processes are exposed to fast-changing markets, increasing customer requirements or fast-moving technology. The objective of “higher – faster – further” also affects business processes. Enterprises need to adapt their business processes to external circumstances in a flexible, agile and rapid manner.
Thus, the aim is to implement agile practices in existing business processes in order to make them more flexible and enable them to cope with the rapidly changing market (Hörner and Schmitt, 2018). Business processes in general should benefit from the effects of agile practices, e.g. by becoming more flexible....