Fit for Continuous Integration: How Organizations Assimilate an Agile Practice

Despite being a cornerstone of agile development, surprisingly little is known about how organizations assimilate continuous integration (CI) and what organizational changes the practice implies. Through a systematic literature review complemented by case study research we address this gap and develop a conceptual framework describing organizational implications of CI assimilation. We employ adoption theory of technology-induced innovation as theoretical lens and argue that as organizations transform through the assimilation stages, ambiguity increases, forcing them to think in alternatives and take tradeoffs. To the existing body of knowledge on agile development assimilation we add an in-depth study of a distinct agile practice.