Putting agile teamwork to the test - an preliminary instrument for empirically assessing and improving agile software development

Abstract

Team organizing is a major way of assisting collaboration in knowledge intensive work such as software development, and is especially favored in agile approaches. Motivated by the challenge of transforming an organization from traditional command-and-control management to collaborative self-managed teams, we present an instrument that we argue addresses key concerns and characteristics of teamwork, and presents them along five dimensions that must be addressed when improving teamwork in agile software development. The dimensions are shared leadership, team orientation, redundancy, learning and autonomy. The instrument gives a radar plot of the status of the teamwork. We present empirical examples from using this instrument with three teams and briefly outline potential uses of the instrument. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.