Overcoming Barriers to Self-Management in Software Teams

This longitudinal case study reports on the challenges with self-management in five projects in experiences of three small and medium-sized software product companies implementing scrum, an agile process. Self-management emerged as the key challenge in all projects. In the transformation from traditional command-and-control management to collaborative self-managing teams, the main challenges were the absence of redundancy and conflict between team- and individual-level autonomy. Our findings are based primarily on qualitative analysis of interviews and observations with developers and product managers. These findings can provide important insight to companies considering self-managing teams and agile development practices.