AI and Agile Software Development: A Research Roadmap from the XP2025 Workshop

2025-08-28

AI Summary

This study addresses critical challenges in integrating generative AI (GenAI) into agile software development: tool fragmentation, inadequate governance mechanisms, poor data quality, and insufficient team-level AI literacy and prompt engineering capabilities. Through a structured, academia–industry collaborative expert workshop, we applied cross-domain analysis—integrating agile practices with GenAI technical frameworks—to systematically identify recurring pain points and distill cross-cutting requirements. Our key contribution is the first research roadmap for GenAI–agile integration that balances short-term deployability with long-term strategic vision, grounded in human-centered, responsible technology adoption. The roadmap synthesizes core research directions—including adaptive AI-assisted sprint planning, explainable AI feedback loops, and context-aware prompt orchestration—and delivers actionable, empirically informed recommendations. It provides both theoretical foundations and practical guidance to enable effective, trustworthy, and sustainable GenAI adoption within agile teams.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Planning with Language Models
• Humans and AI: Teamwork, Team formation
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Artificial General Intelligence

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Agentic search
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic ramifications for generative AI infrastructure and applications

Abstract

This paper synthesizes the key findings from a full-day XP2025 workshop on "AI and Agile: From Frustration to Success", held in Brugg-Windisch, Switzerland. The workshop brought together over 30 interdisciplinary academic researchers and industry practitioners to tackle the concrete challenges and emerging opportunities at the intersection of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and agile software development. Through structured, interactive breakout sessions, participants identified shared pain points like tool fragmentation, governance, data quality, and critical skills gaps in AI literacy and prompt engineering. These issues were further analyzed, revealing underlying causes and cross-cutting concerns. The workshop concluded by collaboratively co-creating a multi-thematic research roadmap, articulating both short-term, implementable actions and visionary, long-term research directions. This cohesive agenda aims to guide future investigation and drive the responsible, human-centered integration of GenAI into agile practices.

Problem

• Addresses challenges in integrating Generative AI with agile development
• Identifies pain points like tool fragmentation and AI literacy gaps
• Creates research roadmap for human-centered GenAI adoption in agile

Innovation

• Workshop co-created multi-thematic research roadmap
• Structured interactive sessions analyzed AI-agile challenges
• Roadmap guides human-centered GenAI agile integration