1 research outputs found
Organisational Structure Patterns in Agile Teams: An Industrial Empirical Study
Forming members of an organization into coherent groups or communities is an
important issue in any large-scale software engineering endeavour, especially
so in agile software development teams which rely heavily on self-organisation
and organisational flexibility. To address this problem, many researchers and
practitioners have advocated a strategy of mirroring system structure and
organisational structure, to simplify communication and coordination of
collaborative work. But what are the patterns of organisation found in practice
in agile software communities and how effective are those patterns? We address
these research questions using mixed-methods research in industry, that is,
interview surveys, focus-groups, and delphi studies of agile teams. In our
study of 30 agile software organisations we found that, out of 7 organisational
structure patterns that recur across our dataset, a single organisational
pattern occurs over 37% of the time. This pattern: (a) reflects young
communities (1-12 months old); (b) disappears in established ones (13+ months);
(c) reflects the highest number of architecture issues reported. Finally, we
observe a negative correlation between a proposed organisational measure and
architecture issues. These insights may serve to aid architects in designing
not only their architectures but also their communities to best support their
co-evolution