Agility in the balance: Control, autonomy, and ambidexterity in agile software development

Abstract

Agile methodologies for information systems development (ISD) are still drawing the attention of the research community. These methodologies promise to increase an ISD team’s adaptiveness in such a way that ISD teams are able to respond and react to changing user requirements.Existing studies on team autonomy in agile ISD, however, implythat these projects potentially can benefit from different elements of control.Our objective is to improve the understanding of how to enact control throughagilepractices, and how these practices influenceteam autonomy and task performance in successful agile ISD projectsin terms of project performance and project quality. This is achieved by developing a preliminary research model that is based on a solid theoretical foundation. As a theoretical framework, we employ ISD ambidexterityand extend it with context-specific insights from controltheory. In consequence, we suggest several propositions for future testing