Assessing Self-Organization in Agile Software Development Teams

摘要

Self-organization, based on the Socio-Technical Design (STS) work design principles, is considered a hallmark of agile software development (SD) teams and an antecedent of motivation and innovation at work. However, while self-organization is considered a salient success factor in agile SD, past research has shown that there are many hurdles in self-organizing. Yet, the actual level of self-organization practiced in agile teams has not been investigated. In this study we develop a measure to do so using the nine principles of STS work design by Cherns [15]. We found that while the level of self-organization varies across agile projects, on each of the nine dimensions the level of self-organization in agile teams was found to be significantly higher than those using plan-driven methods. Furthermore, self-organization was found to positively affect the motivation and innovativeness of SD teams.