Agility from First Principles: Reconstructing the Concept of Agility in Information Systems Development

By Kieran Conboy. Information systems research, 2009

896 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Awareness and use of agile methods has grown rapidly among the information systems development (ISD) community in recent years. Like most previous methods, the development and promotion of these methods have been almost entirely driven by practitioners and consultants, with little participation from the research community during the early stages of evolution. While these methods are now the focus of more and more research efforts, most studies are still based on XP, Scrum, and other industry-driven foundations, with little or no conceptual studies of ISD agility in existence. As a result, this study proposes that there are a number of significant conceptual shortcomings with agile methods and the associated literature in its current state, including a lack of clarity, theoretical glue, parsimony, limited applicability, and naivety regarding the evolution of the concept of agility in fields outside systems development. Furthermore, this has significant implications for practitioners, rendering agile method comparison and many other activities very difficult, especially in instances such as distributed development and large teams that are not conducive to many of the commercial agile methods. This study develops a definition and formative taxonomy of agility in an ISD context, based on a structured literature review of agility across a number of disciplines, including manufacturing and management where the concept originated, matured, and has been applied and tested thoroughly over time. The application of the texonomy in practice is then demonstrated through a series of thought trials conducted in a large multinational organization. The intention is that the definition and taxonomy can then be used as a starting point to study ISD method agility regardless of whether the method is XP or Scrum, agile or traditional, complete or fragmented, out-of-the-box or in-house, used as is or tailored to suit the project context.

Subfields: Information Systems, Management Information Systems, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b3749a695f28c87b5b2f45d7554467ae1e8c622

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Citations in the corpus

Information technology, operational, and management competencies for supply chain agility: Findings from case studies (2011, background): “IT flexibility is defined as the ability of IT infrastructure to adapt to both incremental and revolutionary changes in the business or business process with minimal penalty to current time, effort, cost, or performance (Conboy, 2009; Nelson et al., 1997).”
Coevolving Systems and the Organization of Agile Software Development (2009, background): “2002, Conboy and Fitzgerald 2004) and further conceptual problems such as lack of clarity and lack of “theoretical glue” (Conboy 2009).”
A Control Theory Perspective on Agile Methodology Use and Changing User Requirements (2009, methodology): “…proposition of agile methodologies is that they emphasize and facilitate flexibility in software development (Baskerville et al. 2002, Beck 2000, Conboy 2009, Fowler and Highsmith 2001), thereby enabling software development teams to effectively respond to any requirements changes that might…”
Understanding the Link Between Information Technology Capability and Organizational Agility: An Empirical Examination (2011, background): “However, research has also shown that agile methods may not be equally applicable or always beneficial (Conboy 2009; Maruping et al. 2009; McAvoy and Butler 2009).”
Identifying Viable ‘Need-Solution Pairs’: Problem Solving Without Problem Formulation (2013, positive): “In these reviews, both need statements and solutions developed are topics for review and change (for a review see Conboy 2009).”
Information technology and the search for organizational agility: A systematic review with future research possibilities (2019, background): “Before 2003 – with some exceptions such as Zaheer and Zaheer (1997) – studies on IT and agility primarily focused on agile IS development where the unit of analysis was the IS project, the IS development team or the IS function (Abrahamsson et al., 2009; Agerfalk et al., 2009; Conboy, 2009).”
A decade of agile methodologies: Towards explaining agile software development (2012, background): “Conboy (2009) provides by far the ost comprehensive definition of software development agility by ystematically examining its various facets and definitions from elated disciplines.”
Agile Software Development: Methodologies and Trends (2020, methodology): “A light weight [6] adaptive methods are originated and promoted through an official alliance of 17 software engineering consultants that held in 2001 and resulted in the publication of ‘Agile Software Development manifesto’ [7] in which a set of values and principles in software and system agility a”