Resistance to adoption of an OO software engineering process: empirical study

Human Factors, the so-called Soft Issues, play a vital role in highlighting the differencebetween success and failure for any project where people are involved, resistance tochange, both at a personal and organizational level, being one such factor. In this paper,we report the findings of two empirical studies, using Action Research (AR), that wereconducted over a period of two years at a mid-size publishing organization in Sydney toinvestigate the effect of various human behavioural patterns during the organizationaltransition to Object Technology (OT). This investigation was carried out to validate ourtheory that the appropriate planning and managing of the human factors during anorganizational change may eliminate/mitigate people's natural resistance to change andincrease the chance of success. Here we focus on the resistance factor. Observationsshow that human factors such as resistance to change contributed to the first project'srelative failure whereas acceptance of change (managing resistance) contributed to thesecond project's success. These case studies support the argument that both carefulplanning and management of specific human factors can positively impact the entireorganizational transition process.