A social complexity approach to investigate trust in Agile Methodology

Trust plays an important role in software development teams using Agile Methodology. Previous research reported that the Agile Methodology fosters trust between the development team and the product owner and subsequently the trust improves communications about requirements and expectations with the product owner, and promotes collaborations within the development team. This helped our understanding of the role of trust in Agile methodology; however, it failed to answer the question of why trust is so important in Agile methodology while it has not been so in traditional software development methods. In this paper we use a social complexity approach to investigate the software development process. By looking at software development as a complex endeavor, and using tools and techniques from the Cynefin framework and other models of social complexity, we demonstrate that the increased level of complexity of the software has led to an increase in the level of complexity of the software development process. It transforms the software development process from a simple and complicated process to a complex one. Trust, which functions to resolve complexity, becomes an important factor in such a software development environment. The Agile methodology, which fosters a higher level of trust in the development process, is able to manage the complexity more effectively than traditional software development methods in a complex software development environment, and hence is a favored option in such an environment.