Resistance to Adoption of an OO Software Engineering Process: An Empirical Study

Human Factors, the so-called Soft Issues, play a vital role in highlighting the difference between success and failure for any project where people are involved, resistance to change, 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 were conducted over a period of two years at a mid-size publishing organization in Sydney to investigate the effect of various human behavioural patterns during the organizational transition to Object Technology (OT). This investigation was carried out to validate our theory that the appropriate planning and managing of the human factors during an organizational change may eliminate/mitigate people’s natural resistance to change and increase the chance of success. Here we focus on the resistance factor. Observations show that human factors such as resistance to change contributed to the first project’s relative failure whereas acceptance of change (managing resistance) contributed to the second project’s success. These case studies support the argument that both careful planning and management of specific human factors can positively impact the entire organizational transition process.