The Importance of Conflict Resolution Techniques in Autonomous Agile Teams
This addresses team productivity challenges in software companies by advocating for conflict resolution training, but it is incremental as it builds on existing social science research without introducing new methods or data.
The paper argues that autonomous agile software teams require effective conflict resolution to reach productive stages, proposing that software engineers need additional training in negotiation skills and conflict resolution techniques, with an example highlighting that most conflicts originate from team-level factors and should be managed at that level.
Today, software companies usually organize their work in teams. Social science research on team development has shown that for a team to reach a productive and autonomous stage, it has to be able to manage internal conflicts and disagreements efficiently. To better facilitate the team development process, we argue that software engineers' needs additional training in negotiation skills and conflict resolution. In this position paper, we outline ideas for what aspects to consider in such training. As an example, we argue that a majority of the conflicts originate from team-level factors and that they, therefore, should be managed on the team-level instead of in relation to dyads.