Do As You Want Or Do As You Are Told? Control vs. Autonomy in Agile Software Development Teams

Abstract

Agile Software Development (ASD) projects still draw the attention of the research community. Agile methodologies promise to increase an ASD team's agility in such a way, that these teams are able to respond and react to changing user requirements. Existing studies on flexibility and autonomy in ASD projects, however, imply that these projects potentially can benefit from different elements of control. Our objective is to improve the understanding of how to enact control through agile practices, and how these practices affect either formal or informal control in ASD teams. Based on an extensive literature review, our study (1) provides an overview of adequate control-enacting agile practices and (2) compares the results with our empirical findings, derived from qualitative data.

Agile Practices in Practice: Towards a Theory of Agile Adoption and Process Evolution

“…Yet adopting and effectively using agile ideas and practices still presents a significant challenge to teams and organisations [12]. There also seems to be a disconnect between extant literature discussing what agile is and the comparatively smaller amount of research into how agile is applied in industry [6]. In order to aid those teams looking to make a change to agile it is important to examine how others have already done so and to share their experiences with the wider agile community.…”

A Paradox Lens to Systems Development Projects: The Case of the Agile Software Development

“…I decided to position the tension between management control and team autonomy in the center of Figure 5 to underline power's centrality. The four structural tensions closely relate to the coordination, control, and governance mechanisms in IS development projects in general (for a review, see Wiener et al, 2016) and ASD projects more specifically (Dingsøyr, Moe, & Seim, 2018b;Dreesen & Schmid, 2018;Lappi et al, 2018;Bernzten, Moe, & Stray, 2019).…”