The Systems Approach to Change and the Agile Software Development Context
It addresses the problem of inefficient research practices in software engineering by advocating for integration of known models, but is incremental as it builds on existing work without new empirical results.
The paper argues that existing models for organizational culture change should be applied to agile transitions in software engineering, rather than reinventing approaches through success stories, to better support practitioners as change agents.
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.