Migrating Defect Management from Waterfall to Agile Software Development in a Large-Scale Multi-site Organization: A Case Study

Defect management practices are considered an important part of traditional software development. While embracing agile methods, software development organizations have realized that defects still do exist and they must be managed. Therefore defect management practices should be migrated as well, but current instructions for such a change are fragmented or incomplete. We studied three software development organizations to find out what are the main problems to consider in defect management when migrating from waterfall to agile. We identified five issues related to process, tools and metrics in a multi-site organization. This paper proposes action items to deal with these issues during the agile migration planning activities.