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Journal of the Association for Information Systems

Abstract

Interest in using agile development practices in large corporations continues to grow. However, obstacles exist when large organizations attempt to introduce agile development practices that were designed to be used in small organizational settings. Drawing from the perspective of a system of systems (SoS), this research sheds new light on what makes development teams less likely to use agile development practices in large organizations. Specifically, we suggest that many of the modern information systems in large organizations constitute an SoS—a system of systems, i.e., a large technical system that is comprised of multiple subsystems (e.g., software applications). Building such a system requires different teams working in a coordinated way to integrate the individual applications comprising the system. To understand obstacles to introducing agile development practices in SoS environments, we adopted an engaged research approach and conducted a field study with a Fortune 500 company. This company had traditionally relied on the plan-driven development method (i.e., waterfall development) but was implementing a voluntary transition to agile development practices. Senior leadership wanted to know why teams were unable or unwilling to use agile development practices. Our research at the company showed that a high level of development platform variety across applications within a project is negatively associated with a development team’s use of agile development practices. In addition, we found that the effect resulting from the choice of centralized vs. decentralized decision rights on a development team’s use of agile development practices is contingent on the levels of inter-application dependency and platform variety.

DOI

10.17705/1jais.00974

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