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Organizing self-organizing teams

Published: 01 May 2010 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE '10: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1
May 2010
627 pages
ISBN:9781605587196
DOI:10.1145/1806799
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 May 2010

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Author Tags

  1. agile software development
  2. self-organizing teams
  3. software engineering

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  • (2024)Harmonising Contributions: Exploring Diversity in Software Engineering through CQA Mining on Stack OverflowACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367245333:7(1-54)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Basics of Qualitative Data CollectionQualitative Research with Socio-Technical Grounded Theory10.1007/978-3-031-60533-8_7(141-166)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Traditional Grounded Theory MethodsQualitative Research with Socio-Technical Grounded Theory10.1007/978-3-031-60533-8_2(15-35)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Theory DevelopmentQualitative Research with Socio-Technical Grounded Theory10.1007/978-3-031-60533-8_12(287-330)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
  • (2024)About This BookQualitative Research with Socio-Technical Grounded Theory10.1007/978-3-031-60533-8_1(3-14)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Customised Roles in Scrum Teams for the Development of Secure Solution2023 49th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)10.1109/SEAA60479.2023.00062(362-369)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2023
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