Between Control and Drift: Negotiating Improvement in a Small Software Firm

While the literature on software process improvement (SPI) offers a number of studies of small software firms, little is known about how such initiatives evolve over time. On this backdrop, this paper aims to investigate how adoption of SPI technology was shaped over a ten year period (1996‐2005) in a small Danish software firm. The investigation is based on a longitudinal, interpretative case study of improvement efforts over a ten‐year period. To help structure the investigation, we focus on encounters that impacted engineering, management, and improvement practices within the firm. The study contributes to the SPI‐literature and the literature on organizational adoption of technology. The paper finds the improvement effort fluctuating and shaped between management's attempt to control SPI technology adoption and events that caused the process to drift in unpredictable directions. The experiences suggest that managers of small software firms remain flexible and constantly negotiate technology adoption practices between control and drift, creating momentum and direction according to firm goals through attempts to control, while at the same time exploring backtalk, options, and innovations from drifting forces inside and outside the firm. Based on the research, the paper recommends substituting the “from control to drift” perspective on organizational adoption of complex technologies like SPI with a “negotiating control and drift” perspective.