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A qualitative study of the determinants of self-managing team effectiveness in a scrum team

Published: 21 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

There are many evidences in the literature that the use self-managing teams has positive impacts on several dimensions of team effectiveness. Agile methods, supported by the Agile Manifesto, defend the use of self-managing teams in software development in substitution of hierarchically managed, traditional teams. The goal of this research was to study how a self-managing software team works in practice and how the behaviors of the software organization support or hinder the effectiveness of such teams. We performed a single case holistic case study, looking in depth into the actual behavior of a mature Scrum team in industry.
Using interviews and participant observation, we collected qualitative data from five team members in several interactions. We extract the behavior of the team and of the software company in terms of the determinants of self-managing team effectiveness defined in a theoretical model from the literature. We found evidence that 17 out of 24 determinants of this model exist in the studied context. We concluded that certain determinants can support or facilitate the adoption of methodologies like Scrum, while the use of Scrum may affect other determinants.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHASE '11: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering
    May 2011
    100 pages
    ISBN:9781450305761
    DOI:10.1145/1984642
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 21 May 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. agile methods
    2. qualitative research
    3. self-management
    4. software teams

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    ICSE11: International Conference on Software Engineering
    May 21, 2011
    HI, Waikiki, Honolulu, USA

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    CHASE '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 19 of 36 submissions, 53%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 70 submissions, 67%

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