How do Globally Distributed Agile Teams Self-organise? Initial Insights from a Case Study
This addresses the challenge of self-organization in distributed agile teams for software development, offering insights to improve team composition and governance, but it is incremental as it builds on prior conflicting evidence.
The study investigated how globally distributed agile teams at IBM Rational Jazz self-organize by analyzing role enactment, attitudes, and competencies using psycholinguistics, finding that roles varied with team features and leaders were critical to success.
Agile software developers are required to self-organize, occupying various informal roles as needed in order to successfully deliver software features. However, previous research has reported conflicting evidence about the way teams actually undertake this activity. The ability to self-organize is particularly necessary for software development in globally distributed environments, where distance has been shown to exacerbate human-centric issues. Understanding the way successful teams self-organise should inform distributed team composition strategies and software project governance. We have used psycholinguistics to study the way IBM Rational Jazz practitioners enacted various roles, expressed attitudes and shared competencies to successfully self-organize in their global projects. Among our findings, we uncovered that practitioners enacted various roles depending on their teams' cohort of features; and that team leaders were most critical to IBM Jazz teams' self-organisation. We discuss these findings and highlight their implications for software project governance.