A model for analyzing changes in systems development practices
Even Åby Larsen, Tero Päivärinta, Kari Smolander · The Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application · 2012
AbstractThis paper introduces an empirically grounded model for analyzing intended and unintended changes in the prevalence of information systems development practices. In the model, any development practice observable in a development organization can be analyzed according to two dimensions: the intended scope of defined versus the actual scope of enacted practices.Furthermore, the model identifies eight types of change paths in systems development based on the two dimensions: emergence, entropy, initiation, abandonment, formalization, informalization, implementation, and recalcitrance. The eight types of change paths provide an integrated theoretical model for understanding how systems development can change in organizations and projects and among individual developers in a given context. The paper concludes by discussing how the model complements and integrates concepts of the contemporary research on systems development and outlines its potential uses for future research.Keywords: systems development, software development, practice, changeINTRODUCTIONInformation Systems (IS) scholars have studied systems development methods and for many years. From early on, systems development research has focused on how development should be carried out (e.g., Dijkstra 1965; Parnas 1972). Through the 1970s and 1980s, this led to the construction of numerous systems development methods (SDMs; Jayaratna 1994; Avison and Fitzgerald 2003). Adherence to methods was regarded by default as useful; methods were to be rigorously predefined and utilized as intended by the method developers (Humphrey et al. 1991; Jarke et al. 1994). More recently, the idea of using predefined development methods and has widened to software process improvement (ISO/IEC 2002, Software Engineering Institute 2006) and to the standardization of development processes (ISO/IEC 2008).Despite the vast focus on methods, many of them have a limited conceptual and empirical foundation without extensive scientific evidence (Fitzgerald et al. 2003). Several methods may have been constructed based on the intuition and experience of those who participated in their creation, or they are based on weakly grounded best practices or conventional wisdom. Also, large-scale studies of method use and adoption for information systems development (ISD) are rare. Fitzgerald (1998a) reported that 60 percent of development organizations did not use any methods. Baskerville et al. (2003) point out that the high speed development of the Internet age has led developers to abandon traditional engineering principles, perhaps indicating that those principles are not universal. Kautz et al. (2007) and Siau and Rossi (2011) highlight that more research is needed to fully understand the impact of implementing different practices.Moreover, in contrast to the ideal of adhering to predefined methods and practices, researchers have noted that organizational may be evolutionary (Kostova and Roth 2002), they may involve a tacit component (Kogut and Zander 1992), and they are performed uniquely with variation in a certain time and place (Pentland and Feldman 2005). Regardless of whether predefined SDMs are adopted or not, systems developers and development organizations thus have a number of varying practices, such as change management, testing, and requirements elicitation practices, that the developers and organizations use repeatedly. The developers and organizations may have agreed on them, the organizational management may have instructed the organization to use certain practices, or the may have been shaped and formed by the history and the experiences of the developers and the organization. Some may be standardized and some may be documented, whereas others are less explicitly defined or documented but still repeatedly used.Being motivated by this unclear nature of and by the continuing scarcity of in-depth empirical research on actual development and methods-in-use (Siau and Rossi 2011), we selected our research question: How are systems development formed in professional systems and software development organizations? …