Understanding Self-Organizing Teams in Agile Software Development

Traditional software teams consist of independently focused self-managing professionals with high individual but low team autonomy. A challenge with introducing agile software development is that it requires a high level of both individual and team autonomy. This paper studies the barriers with introducing self-organizing teams in agile software development and presents data from a seven month ethnographic study of professional developers in a Scrum team. We found the most important barrier to be the highly specialized skills of the developers and the corresponding division of work. In addition we found a lack of system for team support, and reduced external autonomy to be important barriers for introducing self-organizing teams. These findings have implications for software development managers and practitioners.