Utilising mindfulness to analyse agile global software development

As Information Systems Development (ISD) organisations face increasing market demands, ISD strategies such as Agile development and Global Systems Development (GSD) have been employed to help address these demands. With anecdotal evidence pointing to substantially successful implementations, organisations are beginning to embrace the combination of these seemingly orthogonal strategies with beneficial results. However, with the two areas of research still maturing, the bulk of research is made up of anecdotal studies. Utilising mindfulness, a theoretical concept for understanding how organisations can achieve flexibility and reliability, this paper explores how to effectively integrate Agile and GSD methodologies. Incorporating a longitudinal case study, an operationalised mindfulness instrument is applied and triangulated with qualitative data. The findings depict an in-depth analysis of a GSD organisation and provide key contributions for practitioners. Furthermore, theoretical contributions of the paper include: (i) a comprehensive definition of mindfulness that incorporates shared understanding as a key component, and (ii) the development of relationships between the individual mindfulness components.