Abstract

Agile information systems development (ISD) is an iterative development methodology, widespread among new product development teams. The agile ISD method is highly responsive to changing requirements, which enables innovation and outputs that meet customer demands. To remain responsive, team members need to continuously obtain new skills and knowledge, making learning an essential part of developing software. Prior research shows that parallel to the learning process the process of unlearning happens which is the intentional liberation of our mental models from false, obsolete and outdated knowledge, beliefs, and work patterns. Team members must be able to quickly and often unlearn, otherwise, their ability to respond to change with innovative solutions is impaired, resulting in adverse effects on the creation of new knowledge. Unlearning is extremely challenging for individuals to undertake in an agile ISD context and only possible under set circumstances that need to be understood. Hence, this research-in-progress paper theorizes about the process of unlearning in agile ISD teams by delineating a conceptual model of enablers and inhibitors on how to apply unlearning in software development. Our research concludes with an outlook on the empirical testing of the proposed conceptual model with a qualitative case study.

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