Non-Technical Individual Skills are Weakly Connected to the Maturity of Agile Practices

Context: Existing knowledge in agile software development suggests that individual competency (e.g. skills) is a critical success factor for agile projects. While assuming that technical skills are important for every kind of software development project, many researchers suggest that non-technical individual skills are especially important in agile software development. Objective: In this paper, we investigate whether non-technical individual skills can predict the use of agile practices. Method: Through creating a set of multiple linear regression models using a total of 113 participants from agile teams in six software development organizations from The Netherlands and Brazil, we analyzed the predictive power of non-technical individual skills in relation to agile practices. Results: The results show that there is surprisingly low power in using non-technical individual skills to predict (i.e. explain variance in) the mature use of agile practices in software development. Conclusions: Therefore, we conclude that looking at non-technical individual skills is not the optimal level of analysis when trying to understand, and explain, the mature use of agile practices in the software development context. We argue that it is more important to focus on the non-technical skills as a team-level capacity instead of assuring that all individuals possess such skills when understanding the use of the agile practices.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur

Управління міжнародним бізнесом: Agility Journey для високотехнологічних компаній

The purpose of the article is the development of recommendations for the business maturity determination and measurement in the implementation of the agile approach for high-tech companies. Methods of analysis of documents, observation, personal and in-depth interviews, case studies have been used in the research. The findings of the research: Business Agility Journey has been suggested for defining the state of the maturity of the company and conducting express diagnostics of agility. Agile Project Management Journey has been developed for the identification of weaknesses by the companies in the path to agility, as well as for the determination of events for the transition from the traditional to the agile approach. Personal Agility Checklist has been designed for testing the soft skills of employees for the presence of the agile mindset. Research limitations include the study of the maturity of companies in the IT industry. Practical implications are based on the use of suggested Agility Journeys in defining the state of maturity and main problems on the transition path. Also, Personal Agility Checklist will help to check the agility of the future employees. The originality of the article is based on the uniqueness of the Agility Journey that has been developed for the first time. Further research on this topic should be focused on the development of an agile mindset as a prerequisite for the provision of agility in the company.Метою статті є розробка рекомендацій щодо визначення та вимірювання зрілості бізнесу при впровадженні еджайл-підходу для високотехнологічних компаній. У дослідженні використовуються методи аналізу документів, спостереження, особистого та глибинного інтерв’ю та кейс-стаді. Розроблено Business Agility Journey для визначення стану зрілості компанії та проведення експрес-діагностики еджайльності. Agile Project Management Journey було розроблено для визначення компаніями своїх слабких сторін, а також заходів для переходу від традиційного до еджайльного підходу. Personal Agility Checklist був створений для перевірки «гнучких навичок» (soft skills) співробітників на наявність гнучкого мислення (agile mindset). Обмеження досліджень включають вивчення зрілості компаній ІТ-галузі. Практична значущість ґрунтується на використанні запропонованих Agility Journeys для визначення стану зрілості та основних проблем на шляху переходу. Також Personal Agility Checklist допоможе перевірити еджайльність майбутніх працівників. Оригінальність статті базується на унікальності Agility Journey, яка була розроблена вперше. Подальші дослідження на цю тему доцільно зосередити на розвитку гнучкого мислення як передумови забезпечення еджайльності в компанії

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