Agile IS Development Success: A Communication-based Model

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christoph Rosenkranz
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance ; Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 239045141

Systems engineering, software engineering, and related disciplines offer development capabilities (techniques, methods, approaches, and paradigms) that have a strong impact on information systems development (ISD). Researchers have investigated ISD over many decades but the research necessity remains obvious, as various studies still point to recurring problems arising in ISD, such as cost or time overruns, rollouts with fewer features than promised, or total failures. Traditional ISD methodologies such as sequential and iterative approaches promote formal communication such as project plans, specification documents, or models to coordinate the development activities. However, it is hard for formal mechanisms of communication to react quickly enough in today's frequently changing development environments. As a consequence, agile ISD methodologies such as Scrum or Extreme Programming have become increasingly popular in industry and have attracted the attention of the research community. Agile ISD methodologies are considered an effective way for developing software and software-intensive information systems (IS) in environments characterized by rapidly changing requirements. Although the body of knowledge on agile ISD is constantly growing, we still lack a detailed understanding of the fundamental processes underpinning agile principles and practices. One of the most fundamental aspects of agile ISD is communication because agile ISD project teams rely intensively on informal communication mechanisms such as frequent face-to-face conversations. In this research, we aim to investigate how agile practices affect the communication processes of ISD project teams in order to extend our knowledge on the theoretical underpinnings of agile ISD. Specifically, we propose that so-called social agile practices have positive effects on the communication informality and frequency of agile ISD teams. This in turn leads to higher mutual understanding and better relationships among team members, resulting in higher ISD success in terms of project performance and user satisfaction. As a theoretical framework, we build on the unified model of ISD success and extend it with context-specific insights from the cognitive-affective model of organizational communication and media naturalness theory. Based on this, first, appropriate measurement scales for the constructs of the research model have to be developed. Subsequently, a pretest and pilot test has to be conducted in order to obtain first indications of the reliability of the developed scales. This is followed by a large-scale empirical test of the research model.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants