Stepwise transition to agile: From three agile practices to Kanban adaptation.

Many smaller companies cannot afford the time and effort to change their development processes all at once. In some cases, companies are not aware of the fact that many aspects of agile development are already in place. The aim of this work was to evaluate if an evolutionary transition to agile software development is suitable for small companies. We conducted a case study with a small company to start their step‐by‐step agile transition. Initially, three agile software development practices were introduced. Based on the assessment of improvements, the transition continued with three Kanban practices. Experiences with the improvement process and the selected practices were elicited by means of qualitative interviews for data collection. Our case study reports details on the implementation of the first practices as well as the way the resulting agile transition has taken so far. The positive experiences reported by all employees during the agile transition indicate that an evolutionary transition is suitable for small companies. The experiences concerning the transition process and the positive effects of the selected practices motivate practitioners to start their own agile transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]