Decision-Making In Agile Software Development Teams: Solving the Optimal Timing Problem

Agile methods are a recent but widely diffused innovation in Information Systems development (ISD). Agile methods call for the creation of organic, flexible and empowered teams who work in active and close collaboration with customers over a series of rapid development iterations. Agile methods can deliver productivity and quality gains by improving task prioritisation, design flexibility, and communication and coordination within and across teams. However, teams must overcome a range of obstacles if these advantages are to be realised. In particular, decision-making in agile settings is challenging, decentralised and pluralistic, frequent and short-term, dynamically complex (decisions are highly interrelated), time and resource constrained, often unstructured, and minimally documented. As such, there have been repeated calls for research on decision making in agile settings.