Balancing acts: walking the Agile tightrope

  • Authors:
  • Rashina Hoda;James Noble;Stuart Marshall

  • Affiliations:
  • Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand;Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand;Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Self-organizing teams are one of the critical success factors on Agile projects - and yet, little is known about the self-organizing nature of Agile teams and the challenges they face in industrial practice. Based on a Grounded Theory study of 40 Agile practitioners across 16 software development organizations in New Zealand and India, we describe how self-organizing Agile teams perform balancing acts between (a) freedom and responsibility (b) cross-functionality and specialization, and (c) continuous learning and iteration pressure, in an effort to maintain their self-organizing nature. We discuss the relationship between these three balancing acts and the fundamental conditions of self-organizing teams - autonomy, cross-fertilization, and self-transcendence.