TUILES: Tuesday Informal Lunchtime Seminars Fall 2014
Tuesday, December 9th
KMC 8-170
Lunch will be available at 12:15 pm. The seminar begins at 12:30 pm.
"Sources of Method-in-Use Variation During Divergent Methodology Use: A Multiple Case Study of Agile and Waterfall Projects"
Veeresh Thummadi
Design methodologies can be interpreted as ‘espoused’ theories of design. At the same time methods-in-use never adhere in their entirety to the blueprints envisaged by the methodology (Avison and Fitzgerald 2003). Currently, there is no deficit in design methodologies, but rather a deficit in accurate understanding of how methodology shapes a given design situation i.e. how espoused design theories and methods-in-use relate. We explore this gap by examining actual design processes following two contrasting design methodologies i.e. agile and waterfall as to evaluate sources of variation among methods-in-use in a similar organizational setting. As an integrating concept we use the idea of an organizational routine and examine four sources of routine variation: (1) method-induced variation: variation that is generated due to sharing of a different method; (2) agency-induced variation: variation that occurs due to different skills and habits of designers; (3) fitness-induced variation: variation that is generated due to specific situations or conditions; and (4) random variation: the variation that is generated due to latent extraneous or physiological factors beyond the control of either the designer or the organization. We carried out a field study from years 2009 to 2013 about software design practices at a fortune 100 company to analyze the work routines in situ in four agile and four waterfall projects. We used a mixed methods approach to identify the cause of the variations in agile and waterfall projects. Our analysis indicates that agile or waterfall methods (by themselves) do not generate drastic variation in routines but rather it is the agency and fitness aspects that accounts for the most of the variation in routines.
Keywords: Software development, agile, waterfall methodology, method-in-use, routine variation, method fit, mixed methods, sequence analysis