Search

Distributed software development (DSD) is becoming everyday practice in the software field. Difficult challenges and difficulty reaching the expected benefits are well documented. The key challenges are communication, coordination and control issues due to temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance. Many solutions have been suggested, ranging form arranging outsourcing to avoid the need for close distributed collaboration, to minimizing the distances and to alleviating the effects of the distances. Recently agile software development methods are reported as successful solutions to many of the problems of DSD. However important incompatibilities between the challenges of DSD and the key tenets of agility exist and achieving a beneficially balanced agile practice in DSD can be difficult. Trust could be the key to this, since trust is crucial for the necessary corporate behavior that leads to team success. This article reports from a study of two agile DSD teams with very different organization and collaboration patterns. It addresses the role of trust and distrust in DSD by analyzing how the team members' trust developed and erode through the lifetime of the two collaborations and how management actions influenced this. We see two important lessons from the analysis. First the agile practices of daily Scrum and self organizing team can empower DSD teams to manage their own development of trust and thereby alleviate the obstacles of DSD. Second if management fails to support the development of trust then it is difficult if not impossible to develop a balanced agile DSD practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile teams are described as "self-organizing". How these teams actually organize themselves in practice, however, is not well understood. Through Grounded Theory research involving 24 Agile practitioners across 14 software organizations in New Zealand and India, we identified six informal roles that team members adopt in order to help their teams self-organize. These roles --- Mentor, Co-ordinator, Translator, Champion, Promoter, and Terminator --- help teams learn Agile practices, liaise with customers, maintain management support, and remove ineffective team members. Understanding these roles will help software teams become self-organizing, and should guide Agile coaches in working with Agile teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]