When Agile Is Not Good Enough: an initial attempt at understanding how to make the right decision

Along the years, Agile has attracted not only the praises of a broad range of enthusiast software developers, but also the blames of a less noisy flight of critical practitioners. Either way, support or relinquishment of Agile seems based more on an emotional attitude than on a critical, well-informed decision making process. In this paper, the dual nature of such criticism is discussed, and, by identifying and classifying most of the arguments against Agile within a critical taxonomy of risk factors, a decisional model and a tool based on such a taxonomy are consequently proposed for supporting software engineers and other stakeholders in the decision-making about whether or not to go Agile. The tool, which is freely available online, comes with a set of guidelines and it aims at encouraging the community of software developers to contribute on further assessing the potential as well as the criticalities of Agile Methods.