A Control Theory Perspective on Agile Methodology Use and Changing User Requirements

Abstract

I n this paper, we draw on control theory to understand the conditions under which the use of agile practices is most effective in improving software project quality. Although agile development methodologies offer the potential of improving software development outcomes, limited research has examined how project managers can structure the software development environment to maximize the benefits of agile methodology use during a project. As a result, project managers have little guidance on how to manage teams who are using agile methodologies. Arguing that the most effective control modes are those that provide teams with autonomy in determining the methods for achieving project objectives, we propose hypotheses related to the interaction between control modes, agile methodology use, and requirements change. We test the model in a field study of 862 software developers in 110 teams. The model explains substantial variance in four objective measures of project quality-bug severity, component complexity, coordinative complexity, and dynamic complexity. Results largely support our hypotheses, highlighting the interplay between project control, agile methodology use, and requirements change. The findings contribute to extant literature by integrating control theory into the growing literature on agile methodology use and by identifying specific contingencies affecting the efficacy of different control modes. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results.

Impact of Agile Methodology on Software Development

“…The use of agile methodology enables the teams to develop software of high quality (Maruping & Viswanath, 2009). The teams gather customer requirements at the initial stage of software development.…”

Coevolving Systems and the Organization of Agile Software Development

“…For example, the relentlessness of time-paced iterative delivery to the customer is mitigated by developers having daily study time. Of further value to practitioners is the identification of agile capabilities, which will help managers assess the extent to which a team is truly agile (and is therefore in the emergent region of complexity) through a focus on project outcomes and collaborative achievement (Maruping et al, 2009). Since agile capabilities are emergent properties of agile teams they could be used as the basis of an agility assessment method that treats the development team as a black box thus allowing managers to assess the agile capability of a team rather than its adoption and use of agile methods.…”

Using Agile Practices to Build Trust in an Agile Team: A Case Study

“…Previous studies highlighted the importance of trust in agile teams (Das and Teng, 2001;Mayer, Davis and Schoorman, 1995;Nerur et al, 2005), but little has been said about how the use of agile practices can increase or decrease trust among team members, which is a motivation for this research. There have also been recent calls for further research that is more practice-focused (Dybå and Dingsøyr, 2008) and to investigate how each distinct agile practice can help to optimise the performance of an ASD team (Maruping, Venkatesh and Agarwal, 2009). Consequently, three practices were selected for the purposes of this study (see Table 1), on the basis that they are amongst the more commonly used agile practices by practitioners (VersionOne, 2009).…”