Balancing Acts: Walking the Agile Tightrope

摘要

Self-organizing teams are one of the critical success factors on Agile projects - and yet, little is known about the self-organizing nature of Agile teams and the challenges they face in industrial practice. Based on a Grounded Theory study of 40 Agile practitioners across 16 software development organizations in New Zealand and India, we describe how self-organizing Agile teams perform balancing acts between (a) freedom and responsibility (b) cross-functionality and specialization, and (c) continuous learning and iteration pressure, in an effort to maintain their self-organizing nature. We discuss the relationship between these three balancing acts and the fundamental conditions of self-organizing teams - autonomy, cross-fertilization, and self-transcendence.