Technology Frame Disruption during Short-Term Agile ISD Projects

Effective collaboration between clients and development teams is vitally important to all Agile ISD methods, enabling the key benefit of Agile approaches which is the ability to react quickly to changing requirements. The process by which this collaboration develops is particularly consequential for short-term Agile projects where we cannot assume that there will be sufficient time for initial "kinks" to be worked out. We develop a process model, based on extended concepts of technology frames and technology frame disruption, to explore the extent to which client framing of software projects is resistant to change in a highly collaborative environment. We report on survey and interview data from fourteen Agile ISD project clients, and discuss continuing research. We find that novice clients\´ frames focus on business-facing technology characteristics, but do not focus on project considerations, most notably the need to understand the capabilities of the team, and the technical constraints of the technology.