Agile Research - Getting beyond the Buzzword

Trupti Narayan Rane

Abstract: "Oh yeah, we're an Agile shop, we gave up Waterfall years ago." - product owners, managers, or could be anyone else. You will seldom have a conversation with a product or software development team member without the agile buzzword thrown at you at the drop of a hat. It would not be an oversell to say that Agile software development has been adopted at a large scale across several big and small organizations. Clearly, Agile is an ideology that is working, which made me explore more on its applicability in research. As someone who has been in the Information Technology sector for more than a decade and a half, and a new entrant in the research community, I am inclined to uplift the best practices from my IT experience and evaluate implementing them in research. The idea is to assess the provocative metaphor of "agile research" and the different research philosophies around the concept. The aim is to explore Agile research methodology, its applicability and find the scenarios where it can add value and those where it may not.

Keywords: Agile Research; Spiral model; Cyclic research method; Grounded theory of research; Action research