“NO ONE CAN DO IT ALL”: THE (CHANGING) ROLE OF EXTERNAL MANAGERS FOR TEAM EMPOWERMENT IN AGILE TEAMS

Agile software development teams require a high degree of team empowerment, but the necessity of these teams to make autonomous decisions and self-organize is at odds with traditional command-and-control management. As more and more organizations adopt agile methods at a large scale, managers can be either a burden or a facilitator in the endeavor to achieve agility. Prior research has extensively studied internal processes of agile teams, but our understanding of the role of team-external managers is limited. In this research, we conducted a case study in five teams in a large organization currently undergoing an agile transformation. We developed a theoretical model of team-external management and its effects on team empowerment. We provide both recommendations for practitioners and a set of hypotheses for empirical testing in future research

Exploring External Leadership in Agile Software Development Teams and its Influence on Team Empowerment

Agile software development (ASD) practices are used in a variety of contexts nowadays, transforming not only IT departments but entire organizations. One of the preconditions for ASD to be successful is that the teams are empowered: they self-organize and act autonomously, thereby taking on traditional management tasks themselves. Hence, the role of traditional managers changes extensively to a more hands-off, enabling management style. With agile teams emerging in large numbers, organizations need to give guidance to external team leaders – managers without a designated position in an agile team – who struggle to find their role in the new environment. If those managers do not take part in the transformation or openly oppose ASD, it can negatively influence team performance. We propose a case study-based research design to develop a theoretical model on the interplay between agile teams and external team leaders and its influence on the teams’ empowerment

Incorporating Agile with MDA Case Study: Online Polling System

Nowadays agile software development is used in greater extend but for small organizations only, whereas MDA is suitable for large organizations but yet not standardized. In this paper the pros and cons of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Extreme programming have been discussed. As both of them have some limitations and cannot be used in both large scale and small scale organizations a new architecture has been proposed. In this model it is tried to opt the advantages and important values to overcome the limitations of both the software development procedures. In support to the proposed architecture the implementation of it on Online Polling System has been discussed and all the phases of software development have been explained.Comment: 14 pages,1 Figure,1 Tabl

Project Success in Agile Development Projects

The paper explains and clarifies the differences between Waterfall and Agile development methodologies, establishes what criteria could be taken into account to properly define project success within the scope of software development projects, and finally tries to clarify if project success is the reason why many organizations are moving to Agile methodologies from other ones such as Waterfall. In the form of a literature review, it analyses several, publications, investigations and case studies that point out the motives why companies moved to Agile, as well as the results they observed afterward. It also analyses overall statistics of project outcomes after companies evolved from traditional methodologies such as Waterfall to Agile development approaches

DevOps in Practice -- A preliminary Analysis of two Multinational Companies

DevOps is a cultural movement that aims the collaboration of all the stakeholders involved in the development, deployment and operation of soft-ware to deliver a quality product or service in the shortest possible time. DevOps is relatively recent, and companies have developed their DevOps prac-tices largely from scratch. Our research aims to conduct an analysis on practic-ing DevOps in +20 software-intensive companies to provide patterns of DevOps practices and identify their benefits and barriers. This paper presents the preliminary analysis of an exploratory case study based on the interviews to relevant stakeholders of two (multinational) companies. The results show the benefits (software delivery performance) and barriers that these companies are dealing with, as well as DevOps team topology they approached during their DevOps transformation. This study aims to help practitioners and researchers to better understand DevOps transformations and the contexts where the practices worked. This, hopefully, will contribute to strengthening the evidence regarding DevOps and supporting practitioners in making better informed decisions about the return of investment when adopting DevOps.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, conferenc

Learning more from crossing levels: Investigating agility at three levels of the organization

Scholars have tried to explain how organizations can build agile teams by only looking at one level of analysis. We argue in this short paper that lessons can be learned from organizational science results explaining variance on three different abstraction levels of organizations. We suggest agility needs to be explained from organizational (macro), the team (meso), and individual (micro) levels to provide useful and actionable guidelines to practitioners. We are currently designing such studies and hope that they will eventually result in validated measurements that can be used to prevent companies from investing in the wrong areas when trying to move towards more agility