Abstract
AI coding assistants are used daily by most professional developers, yet organisations treat them as individual tools within stable team structures, leaving fragmentation and governance unaddressed. This study investigates whether practitioners perceive AI integration as an organisational design problem and whether they consider a three-layer model (System, Platform, and Product Teams) plausible. We surveyed $n=99$ professional developers with 28~Likert items normalised to a $-3$ to $+3$ scale. Practitioners endorse AI development environments as shared infrastructure, yet a gap between the model's abstract plausibility ($M=+1.49$) and its perceived applicability ($M=+0.76$) reveals an acknowledged maturity deficit. Intensive AI users frame integration as an organisational challenge more strongly ($d=1.63$, $p<.001$) and report pronounced shifts from producing code towards reviewing and steering AI outputs ($r=.790$, $p<.001$). Agile practices evolve selectively, with Continuous Integration and TDD gaining governance significance. Organisations therefore have a window of opportunity to respond structurally before fragmentation becomes entrenched.
Paper Type
Short Paper
DOI
10.62036/ISD.2026.132
From Tool Adoption to Organisational Design: An Empirical Study of AI Integration in Agile Software Development
AI coding assistants are used daily by most professional developers, yet organisations treat them as individual tools within stable team structures, leaving fragmentation and governance unaddressed. This study investigates whether practitioners perceive AI integration as an organisational design problem and whether they consider a three-layer model (System, Platform, and Product Teams) plausible. We surveyed $n=99$ professional developers with 28~Likert items normalised to a $-3$ to $+3$ scale. Practitioners endorse AI development environments as shared infrastructure, yet a gap between the model's abstract plausibility ($M=+1.49$) and its perceived applicability ($M=+0.76$) reveals an acknowledged maturity deficit. Intensive AI users frame integration as an organisational challenge more strongly ($d=1.63$, $p<.001$) and report pronounced shifts from producing code towards reviewing and steering AI outputs ($r=.790$, $p<.001$). Agile practices evolve selectively, with Continuous Integration and TDD gaining governance significance. Organisations therefore have a window of opportunity to respond structurally before fragmentation becomes entrenched.
Recommended Citation
Hinderks, A., Thomaschewski, J. & Schön, E.M.(2026). From Tool Adoption to Organisational Design: An Empirical Study of AI Integration in Agile Software Development. In M. Valenta, B. Mannová, R. Pergl, A. Przybylek, M. Lang, H. Linger, C. Schneider, N. Iivari, & E. Insfran (Eds.), Making ISD Sustainable: Reloaded with AI and Automation (ISD2026 Proceedings). Prague, Czech Republic: Czech Technical University in Prague. ISBN: 978-80-01-07585-2. https://doi.org/10.62036/ISD.2026.132