Five Agile Factors: Helping Self-management to Self-reflect

Abstract

In this paper a tool is proposed to foster reflection in agile software development teams. Based upon the qualitative model of Moe et al. [11], we contribute a quantitative questionnaire organized along five dimensions of agile teamwork analogous to the "Five Factor Model" in contemporary psychology. To test this survey tool and its alignment with existing studies, we have executed an empirical validation of the tool with 79 individuals and 8 international Scrum teams. We find that inter-team agreement on the factors is high and that the survey tool is found very useful. The instrument offers a comparable measure to agile teams and gives recommendations for each of the factors helping to understand individual as well as organizational level barriers.