The Role of Organisation Culture on The Adoption and Diffusion of Software Engineering Process: An Empirical Study

This paper reports empirical fmdings (using Action Research) of an industrial case studyaimed at identifying and understanding the influence of organizational culture on the processof adopting and diffusing a software engineering process. The organization under study isgoing through a transitioning process to an object-oriented development environment whichwill use the OO software development process known as OPEN together with the UMLnotation. Initially, a single team working on a single project have been charged with theadoption process for OO/OPEN prior to the diffusion of that technology throughout theorganization. Here, we report on the adoption phase in which we were involved in twodifferent projects with the same organization. The first project effectively failed and wasterminated after only two months whereas the second project is still active after nearly a yearand is now reaching its final stage. Analysis of our observations of the changes in theorganization shows organizational culture has contributed to the first project's failure and tothe second project's success.