Improving Soft Skills in Agile Software Development by Team Leader Rotation

Abstract

New agile techniques have brought advantages over traditional techniques. However, agile techniques fail to solve soft skills problems. People with high technical knowledge still find difficulties to adapt to industrial work environments due to the lack of soft skills. At the individual level, specific skills are not perfected, questioned or transmitted. Team members with weaknesses in leadership and communication do not establish a regular channel for dissemination and resolution of disputes. Soft skill problems must be resolved quickly, at least, at the beginning of a project. Thus, people with high potential can lead to having a high impact on development iterations. This paper presents an agile technique taking into account weaknesses in soft skills. The proposed technique is based on rotating the leader team according to an iteration. Experimental evaluation shows that team members reach minimum communication soft skills after a short time. At the same time, teams gain more cohesion and better knowledge of everyone.