The 2nd Workshop on Agile Practice & Research: A Summary and Call For Research
This paper summarizes the 2nd Agile Practice & Research Workshop held at XP 2026, which addressed persistent gaps between academic research and industrial practice by proposing four strategic propositions and three specific calls for research to foster stronger, more effective collaboration.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Imagine a bustling city where two groups of people are trying to build the same skyscraper, but they are speaking different languages and living in different time zones.
- Group A (The Researchers) are like architects working in a quiet, climate-controlled library. They spend years drawing perfect blueprints, studying the physics of materials, and writing thick manuals on how buildings should be built.
- Group B (The Practitioners) are the construction crews on the muddy, chaotic site. They are dealing with rain, changing weather, new tools arriving every week, and bosses who want the building finished yesterday.
For over twenty years, these two groups have been trying to work together on "Agile" software development (a way of building software that is flexible and fast). But, as this paper explains, they keep missing each other. The architects' blueprints often feel too theoretical for the crew, and the crew's daily problems change too fast for the architects to write about them in time.
To fix this, the authors held a special meeting (a workshop) in São Paulo, Brazil, bringing 20 of these architects and builders together to figure out what's going wrong and how to fix it.
The Three Big Gaps
The paper identifies three main "chasm" gaps between the library and the construction site:
The Theory Gap (The "Why" is missing):
The construction crew often looks at the architects' blueprints and says, "This looks great in theory, but does it actually work when the wind is howling?" The paper says that much of the research is just a collection of stories about what happened in one specific project, without a strong underlying theory to explain why it worked or if it would work elsewhere. It's like having a recipe that says "add salt" but doesn't explain the chemistry of why salt makes the food taste better.The Time Gap (The "When" is wrong):
The construction site changes incredibly fast. New tools (like Artificial Intelligence) and new ways of working (like remote teams) appear overnight. The library, however, moves slowly. By the time an architect finishes a 3-year study on a specific tool, the construction crew has already moved on to the next big thing. The research is often a year or two behind the reality of the job site.The Transfer Gap (The "How" is confusing):
Even when the architects have a great idea, they write it in a language only other architects understand (heavy academic jargon). The construction crew can't read it, doesn't have time to decode it, or doesn't know how to turn the abstract idea into a hammer-and-nail action. The knowledge is there, but it's locked behind a door the crew can't open.
The Workshop Solution: A Team Huddle
To bridge these gaps, the workshop participants broke into small groups to brainstorm. They didn't just complain; they looked for root causes and immediate fixes.
From their huddle, they came up with Four Big Ideas (Propositions) to get the two groups to work better together:
- Speak Human: Researchers need to learn to talk like people, not just professors. They should write blogs, make videos, and speak at industry meetups, not just in academic journals. They need to translate their "blueprints" into instructions the crew can actually use.
- Ride the Wave: Researchers need to pay attention to what the construction crew is actually worried about right now. Instead of studying what was interesting five years ago, they should focus on current pain points like "how do we make money with this?" or "how do we handle this new AI tool?"
- Reward the Teamwork: Currently, there isn't much reward for a researcher to hang out with a construction crew, or for a crew member to talk to a researcher. The paper suggests we need to create better "incentives" (like career boosts or recognition) so both sides want to collaborate.
- Learn by Doing: The paper suggests that researchers should use "educational" methods (like project-based learning) in their own research. Just as students learn best by building things, researchers should structure their studies to be more practical and iterative, rather than just observing from a distance.
The Call to Action: Three Rules for the Future
Finally, the authors issue a "Call for Research," which is basically a set of rules they want future researchers to follow to make sure their work is actually useful:
- Be Open (The "Glass House" Rule): Researchers must be transparent. They should share their raw data, their notes, and their code openly (Open Science). This way, anyone can check their work, repeat their experiments, and build upon their findings. It's like leaving the construction site's blueprints on a public table so everyone can see how the building was made.
- Aim for Gold Standard Quality: Don't just guess. Research needs to be built on a solid theoretical foundation and designed with extreme rigor. It shouldn't just be a "we tried this and it seemed okay" story; it needs to be a scientifically sound study that can be proven to work again and again.
- Explain the Value: Every research paper must clearly answer the question: "So what?" It needs to explicitly state how the findings help the real world. The paper gives examples of "artifacts" (tools or frameworks) that researchers can create. Some are based on findings (like a new way to organize a team), and some are based on methods (like a platform that helps teams collect data while they work). Both must clearly show their value to the people actually doing the work.
In short: The paper argues that for Agile software development to keep improving, the "thinkers" and the "doers" need to stop talking past each other. They need to speak the same language, work on the same timeline, and share their tools openly so everyone can build better software together.
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