Explaining the emergence of team agility: a complex adaptive systems perspective

Abstract

Purpose: Agile software development helps software producing organizations to respond to manifold challenges. While prior research focused on agility as a project or process phenomenon, we suggest that agility is an emergent phenomenon on the team level. Research approach: Using the theory of complex adaptive systems (CASs), we capture the multiple influencing levels of software development teams (SDTs) and their interplay with self-organization and emergence. We investigate three agile SDTs in different contextual environments that participate with four or more different roles each. Findings: The results suggest self-organization as a central process when understanding team agility. While contextual factors often provide restriction on self-organization, they can help the team to enhance its autonomy. Research implications: Our theoretical contributions result from the development and test of theory-grounded propositions and the investigation of mature agile development teams. Practical implications: Our findings help practitioners to improve the cost-effectiveness ratio of their team's operations. Originality: The study provides empirical evidence for the emergence of team agility in agile SDTs. Using the lens of CAS; the study suggests the importance of the team's autonomy.

Shared mental models and perceived proximity: a comparative case study

“…30 companies, and why these often seem to fail or be rejected by software developers. We posit that teams of software developers, collocated or distributed, who use agile approaches in their practice, require some sense of self-organisation and self-regulation of their everyday so that they can build autonomy, and, in doing so, overcome the complexity that agile software development brings about (Werder & Maedche, 2018).…”

“…Typically, studies on virtual work focus on the temporal organization of collaborative work (Eisenberg & Krishnan, 2018;Jiao et al, 2016;O'Leary et al, 2014;Prasad et al, 2017;Wilson et al, 2008) rather than on the impact of time on virtual work itself. The team work literature suggests that time supports team members to perceive team processes and their peers' skills more accurately (Filho et al, 2014), and that time allows teams to achieve stability and psychological safety, especially when they're self-managed (Werder & Maedche, 2018…”

Leadership Gap in Agile Teams: How Teams and Scrum Masters Mature

“…A team learns how to be agile while undergoing different maturity stages [10]. Hence, agility of a team is a process that unfolds over time [21]. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, there is no empirical analysis of the changing leadership role of the Scrum Master during the agile journey.…”

Samoorganizujące się zespoły projektowe - dotychczasowe rozważania i nowe propozycje badawcze

“…emergencja przywództwa (Hoda i in., 2010), autonomia, czyli wolność wyborów dokonywanych przez zespół (Dyer, Ericksen, 2005; Moe i in. 2010; Langfred, 2004), upełnomocnienie, czyli partycypacja w podejmowaniu decyzji (Sheffield, Lemétayer, 2013; Srivastava, Jain, 2017), dynamika lokalna, czyli zmiany w relacjach na poziomie zespołu, a także elastyczność i adaptacja (Werder, Maedche, 2018).…”

“…W pierwszym kroku (A.1) etapu A wyszukano teksty naukowe zawierające słowa (kryteria) związane z samoorganizacją self-organization i samozarządzaniem self-management i -zgodnie z oczekiwaniami -w wyniku takich przeszukiwań uzyskano bardzo dużą liczbę publikacji. Samoorganizacja dotyczy bowiem systemów złożonych i jest wykorzystywana w różnych naukach jako model wyjaśniania różnorodnych zjawisk (Werder, Maedche, 2018). W procesie badawczym należało zatem ograniczać wyselekcjonowany zbiór i systematycznie zmniejszać liczbę prac do dalszej analizy.…”