Responding to Changes: The Grounded Theory of Agile Activities in Software Development

Abstract

This paper aims to address the challenges of responding to changes in small agile teams by presenting "a grounded theory of agile activities" - a high-level descriptive theory that explains how these teams manage their activities to respond to changes in software development field. The thesis identifies four main domains of agile acts - communication and collaboration, learning, balancing, and adapting - that help agile teams develop the necessary abilities to respond to changes. Additionally, the thesis highlights how these four domains interplay with each other to build an adaptive and evolvable system that facilitates agile teams. Furthermore, this thesis provides managerial implications for both agile and management teams to navigate the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment more effectively.