Coevolving Systems and the Organization of Agile Software Development

By Richard T. Vidgen, Xiaofeng Wang. Information systems research, 2009

349 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite the popularity of agile methods in software development and increasing adoption by organizations there is debate about what agility is and how it is achieved. The debate suffers from a lack of understanding of agile concepts and how agile software development is practiced. This paper develops a framework for the organization of agile software development that identifies enablers and inhibitors of agility and the emergent capabilities of agile teams. The work is grounded in complex adaptive systems (CAS) and draws on three principles of coevolving systems: match coevolutionary change rate, maximize self-organizing, and synchronize exploitation and exploration. These principles are used to study the processes of two software development teams, one a team using eXtreme Programming (XP) and the other a team using a more traditional, waterfall-based development cycle. From the cases a framework for the organization of agile software development is developed. Time pacing, self-management with discipline and routinization of exploration are among the agile enablers found in the cases studies while event pacing, centralized management, and lack of resources allocated to exploration are found to be inhibitors to agility. Emergent capabilities of agile teams that are identified from the research include coevolution of business value, sustainable working with rhythm, sharing and team learning, and collective mindfulness.

Subfields: Information Systems, Management of Technology and Innovation, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9b2b930234ab4db46da9b883efd767802037e52

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In Information Systems

In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Management Science and Operations Research

Citations in the corpus

Management challenges in creating value from business analytics (2017, background): “, data scientists can learn new techniques from other data scientists), and establishing a culture of professional excellence (Vidgen and Wang, 2009).”
Guest editorial: qualitative studies in information systems: a critical review and some guiding principles (2013, methodology): “While we found that quotes are sometimes used to support a fact (e.g., Vidgen and Wang 2009), they can be used more effectively to transport the reader to the context (e.g., Day et al. 2009) or to involve the reader emotionally (e.g., Sarker et al. 2006).”
Information technology and the search for organizational agility: A systematic review with future research possibilities (2019, background): “…to trigger an IT response), centralized IS management, a lack of resources for IT exploration, and distributed IS development can impose limits on agile IS development that produce a knock on effect on organizational agility (Ramesh et al., 2012; Sarker and Sarker, 2009; Vidgen and Wang, 2009).”