A Case Study of Continuous Adoption in the Norwegian Public Sector

The Norwegian public sector has become increasingly software-intensive. To enable faster software delivery involving frequent deployments, software development teams building new solutions for public sector employees and citizens have started to embrace a Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) approach. Research on CSE has primarily had an inward focus on the development practices including Continuous Integration and Delivery. Far fewer studies have had an outward focus that considers the involvement of users of a system that is delivered incrementally, and 'continuously.' Further, most CSE research is conducted in commercial settings, where the quest to innovate and retain users in a competitive market is key. This paper presents a case study of new systems development in the Norwegian public sector. Our analysis identified the concept of “Continuous Adoption” as a distinct concept from Continuous Use. This paper extends the CSE literature, and complements traditional adoption literature. This paper presents a definition and identifies three key dimensions, namely transparency, feedback, and evolving context, and illustrates these using an in-depth analysis of a longitudinal case study.