The Systems Approach to Change and the Agile Software Development Context

TL;DR

This paper advocates for leveraging existing organizational culture models to facilitate agile transitions in software engineering, emphasizing integration of these models into research and practice to improve change management.

Contribution

It highlights the importance of adopting established cultural change models in software engineering to support agile transformations, urging research and practitioners to recognize and utilize these models.

Findings

Existing models for cultural change are applicable to agile transitions.

Research should investigate differences between models in software engineering context.

Practitioners act as change agents using these models.

Abstract

There is a diversity of models explaining organizational culture and how these complex aspects can be addressed in connection to organizational change efforts. This workshop paper claims that models already exist for dealing with the cultural change that an agile transition is in the software engineering context. Instead of realizing this again through agile success stories, and thus reinventing the wheel, it is argued that the research in the software engineering field should build on these models instead and investigate how/if they differ. Practitioners already work as the change agents described in other fields and they should get recognition through the presence and integration of these models in the software engineering process research.