Agile Software Development Practices and Success in Outsourced Projects: The Moderating Role of Requirements Risk

Although agile practices are gaining in popularity, there is little evidence showing how particular agile practices, in particular those involving the client, affect the success of outsourced software projects. Data from a matched survey of sponsors and developers in 60 outsourced information systems projects indicate negative effects of continuous analysis and positive effects of joint decision making and continuous integration on project success. Moreover, interaction analyses show that some positive effects are enhanced and negative effects dampened when requirements risk is high. These findings caution against continuous analysis in outsourced projects while they support joint decision making and continuous integration. The findings also empirically substantiate the largely untested assertion that agile practices help cope with changing requirements

How Scrum Adds Value to Achieving Software Quality?

Scrum remains the most popular agile software development method implementation for a variety of reasons; one important motive is to improve software quality. Yet many organizations fail to achieve quality improvements through the use of Scrum, and existing research sheds little light on the value-add of Scrum for software quality. More specifically, (1) how notions of software quality among Scrum practitioners relate to established quality perspectives, (2) how Scrum helps teams to achieve higher software quality and (3) why some teams fail to meet the objective of higher quality. We addressed these gaps through a two-phased qualitative study based on 39 interviews and two in-depth case studies. We find that Scrum practitioners emphasize established notions of external quality comprising of conformity to business needs and absence of defects, while they also value internal quality, especially sustainable software design. Our results show that Scrum helps teams achieve both dimensions of quality by promoting some social antecedents (collaboration, psychological safety, accountability, transparency) and process-induced advantages (iterative development, formal inspection, and adaptation). Our findings unveil how these factors contribute to achieving software quality and under what conditions their effects can fail to materialize. These conditions include inconsistent Scrum implementations, cultural constraints, team tensions, and inaccessibility of end-users. In addition, the complexity of the project aggravates the impact of these conditions. Taken together, these findings show that Scrum can complement established quality assurance and software engineering practices by promoting a social environment that is conducive to creating high-quality software. Based on our findings, we provide specific recommendations for how practitioners can create such an environment

Software Development in the Cloud: Exploring the Affordances of Platform-as-a-Service

Software development teams increasingly adopt platform-as-a-service (PaaS), i.e., cloud services that make software development infrastructure available over the internet. Yet, empirical evidence of whether and how software development work changes with the use of PaaS is difficult to find. We performed a grounded-theory study to explore the affordances of PaaS for software development teams. We find that PaaS enables software development teams to enforce uniformity, to exploit knowledge embedded in technology, to enhance agility, and to enrich jobs. These affordances do not arise in a vacuum. Their emergence is closely interwoven with changes in methodologies, roles, and norms that give rise to self-organizing, loosely coupled teams. Our study provides rich descriptions of PaaS-based software development and an emerging theory of affordances of PaaS for software development teams

Explaining Multisourcing Decisions in Application Outsourcing

Multisourcing—the delegation of interdependent tasks to multiple vendors—is receiving increasing attention in practice and in research. Yet, we know little about the circumstances under which organizations choose multisourcing. In this paper, we draw on incomplete contracting theory and the knowledge-based view to explain multisourcing decisions in application projects. We test our model using a comprehensive dataset of 1093 sourcing decisions made by Swiss public organizations. The results provide strong support for the model. We find that clients choose multisourcing more frequently when (1) the project is large, (2) the software is client-specific and the project is large enough, (3) client and vendor lack joint experience, (4) the client seeks knowledge, (5) the technology is not proprietary, and (6) the client is experienced in outsourcing. While these findings support common views that clients choose multisourcing in response to opportunistic threats and to knowledge needs, the findings also shed light on prerequisites for multisourcing

Change of Organizational Routines under Malleable Information Technology: Explaining Variations in Momentum

Malleable technology bears the promise of allowing users to flexibly change organizational routines. Although the benefits from malleable technology depend on the extent to which users make use of such technology to change organizational routines, we know little about the factors that shape the intensity of routine change. We report the results of a case study in which we analyzed changes of 24 routines under malleable technology over a period of three years. Our results show that actors often perform a series of consecutive changes rather than one discrete change. We build on the concept of momentum to describe the intensity of these changes. Our emergent theory suggests that momentum is affected by the embeddedness of routines, by existing artefacts, by lead actor traits, and by external knowledge. Our study contributes to theory of routine change by developing explanations for variations in momentum of routine change under malleable technology

How Social Media-Enabled Communication Awareness Enhances Project Team Performance

Project teams increasingly rely on computer-mediated communication. In this paper, we propose that communication within these teams benefits from a communication-awareness feature that summarizes communication at one common place. We argue that such a feature pays out specifically during action episodes, when team members engage in taskwork. We conducted two studies of 51 and 35 project teams to examine how the amount of communication during action episodes relates to team performance under low versus high communication awareness. In both studies, we technologically designed communication awareness as the availability of a feed, known from social media platforms, that displays all team-internal, computer-mediated communication. The results show that the communication-awareness feature makes communication during action episodes more beneficial, both in term of effectiveness and efficiency. Zooming into the temporal patterns of communication during action episodes further reveals that high-performing teams in the high-communication-awareness condition stick out by early and steady communication. Implications for current and future research on team communication and awareness support are discussed

When Less is More: How Short-message Feeds in Social Media Platforms Affect Collaborative Learning

Social media platforms bear the promise of enhancing interactions in collaborative learning. Yet, relatively little is known about how short-message feeds, a key feature in many social media platforms, affect collaborative learning. We report the results of a field experiment in which we manipulated the social media platform that 53 teams of four students used for a collaborative learning task over three weeks. We find that students provided with short-message feeds achieved significantly better learning outcomes than students without. While learner engagement was similar in both conditions, learner communication was more focused on the task in the condition with short-message feeds. The short-message feed led learners to curtail social communication and uncertainty statements, which mediated the effect of the short-message feeds on learning outcomes. Our study provides new insights into the effect of short-message feeds on collaborative learning and communication

Adoption Management: A Review of the Benefits Management and the Adoption Literature

The adoption of Information Systems (IS) has been, and is predicted to remain, one of the key topics for IS research and practice. Despite the extensive and rich insights provided across IS literature streams, there remains a significant amount of IS implementation projects that struggle with adoption and benefits realization. This paper argues that a knowledge gap exists because research has paid little attention to the definition, manifestations, and effects of adoption management. The article proposes a definition and reviews findings related to adoption management at the cross-section of the adoption and benefits management literatures. The article answers the research questions: What findings on managing adoption do the adoption and the benefits management literature provide? How do the adoption and the benefits management literatures differ in their examination of managing adoption? What limitations in relation to managing adoption are identified when combining adoption literature and benefits management literature? Through a systematic literature review, the findings show that adoption management is constructed across the two literature streams as practices, tools, and supportive contexts. While some articles treat adoption management in their core sections, many focus on adoption management as an after-thought in the discussion section, and none of the articles explicitly labels it adoption management. We discuss these and other gaps and provide avenues for future research

Knowledge transfer in software-maintenance offshore outsourcing

Software-maintenance offshore outsourcing (SMOO) projects have been plagued by tedious knowledge transfer during the service transition to the vendor. Vendor engineers risk being over-strained by the high amounts of novel information, resulting in extra costs that may erode the business case behind offshoring. Although stakeholders may desire to avoid these extra costs by implementing appropriate knowledge transfer practices, little is known on how effective knowledge transfer can be designed and managed in light of the high cognitive loads in SMOO transitions. The dissertation at hand addresses this research gap by presenting and integrating four studies. The studies draw on cognitive load theory, attributional theory, and control theory and they apply qualitative, quantitative, and simulation methods to qualitative data from eight in-depth longitudinal cases. The results suggest that the choice of appropriate learning tasks may be more central to knowledge transfer than the amount of information shared with vendor engineers. Moreover, because vendor staff may not be able to and not dare to effectively self-manage learn-ing tasks during early transition, client-driven controls may be initially required and subsequently faded out. Collectively, the results call for people-based rather than codification-based knowledge management strategies in at least moderately specific and complex software environments