Professor Torgeir Dingsøyr, SINTEF Research Foundation, Norway, gave this seminar on Are Agile Teams More Effective? Findings from the Teamwork Literature and Empirical Studies of Agile Teams at the Whitaker Institute on 10th September 2014

1. Are Agile Teams More Effective?
Findings from the Teamwork Literature and
Empirical Studies of Agile Teams
National University of Ireland, Galway
10 September 2014
Torgeir Dingsøyr
Senior scientist, SINTEF ICT
Adjunct professor, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

2. 2
Overview
n Agile Software Development
n Teamwork and Team Effectiveness
n Teamwork in Agile Software Development: A Case Study
n Are Agile Teams more Effective?
n References and Resources

3. 3
Agile Software Development

4. Agile development, productivity and teamwork
“Scrum significantly increases productivity and reduces time to
benefits while facilitating adaptive, empirical systems
development” Controlchaos.com
"a variety of people work together in interlinking ways to make a
project more effective. They have to work together as a group to
make each to be succesful" Beck and Andres
"The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge
from self-organizing teams"
Principle behind agile manifesto

5. 5
Teamwork and Team
Performance

6. What is a Team?
“a small number of people with complementary skills who are
committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals,
and approach for which they hold themselves mutually
accountable”
- Katzenbach, J.R., Smith, D.K.: The Discipline of Teams. Harvard
Business Review 71, 111–120 (1993)
IKT

7. IKT
Team
leadership
Team
orientation
Mutual
performance
monitoring
Back-up
behaviour
Adaptability
Shared
mental
models
Mutual
trust
Closed-loop
Salas, E. 2005. Is there a “Big Five” in communication
Teamwork? Small Group Research 36,
no. 5: 555-599.

8. 8
Teamwork in Agile Software
Development: A Case Study

9. ICT
Research Design
n Research questions
n How does Scrum arrange for the mechanisms that influence
teamwork?
n How can challenges that arise when Scrum is introduced be
explained by the mechanisms that influence teamwork?
n Study
n Development of an office application for public departments
n 5 developers, scrum master and product owner
n 4000 hours
n Start: May 2006, end October 2007
n 6 sprints
n First Scrum project
Moe, N.B., Dingsøyr, T., and Dybå, T., A teamwork model for understanding an agile team: A case study of a Scrum project,
Information and Software Technology 52 (2010) 480–491.

10. ICT
Project Overview

11. 9
Data Collection and Analysis
n 60 Direct observations: from 10 minutes to 8 hours
n 15 interviews
n Project documents
n Analysed according to teamwork model

12. ICT
In Theory: Team Leadership
n Definition:
n Direct and coordinate the
activities of other team
members
n Assess team performance
n Assign tasks
n Develop team knowledge,
skills, and abilities
n Motivate team members
n Plan, organize, and establish a
positive atmosphere
n The Scrum team:
n Planning
n Scheduling
n Assigning tasks to members
n Making decisions
n The Scrum master:
n Removes impediments of the
process
n Facilitates meetings

13. In Practice: Team Leadership
n Problems not reported
n “We classified tasks as finished before they were completed, and we
knew there was still work to be done. It seems that the scrum master
wants to show progress and make us look a little better than we really
are” – developer
n “It turned out that certain parts of the system were simply forgotten.
There has been a failure somewhere... The product owner and the
client asked for things that no-one had thought of and that were not in
the backlog” – developer
n “The daily meetings are mostly about reporting to the Scrum master.
When he is not there, the meetings are better because then we
communicate with each other” – developer
ICT

15. ICT
In Theory: Team Orientation
n Definition:
n Take other’s behaviour into
account during group
interaction
n The belief in the importance
of team goal’s over
individual members’ goals
n Scrum:
n The team does high level goal
setting
n The Product owner provides a
vision
n Sprint planning, daily meetings
and retrospectives

16. In Practice: Team Orientation
From a daily stand-up meeting:
Developer: The customer databases will be used by several
applications, so I have implemented support for dealing with various
technologies, including Oracle. It took a lot of time.
Scrum-master: Did we not agree on postponing this?
Developer: We need this later and now it is done.
n “When it comes to the daily scrum, I do not pay attention when Ann is
talking. For me what she talks about is a bit off the topic, and I cannot
stay focused. She talks about the things she is working on.” – developer
n Monthly planning meetings somehow excluded the developers and
turned out to be discussions between the Scrum master and the Product
owner – notes after observing sprint planning
ICT

17. In Practice: Team Orientation
n “When we discover new problems, we feel we own them
ourselves, and that we will manage to solve them before
the next meeting tomorrow. But this is not the case, it
always takes longer time” – developer
ICT

18. In Theory: Backup Behaviour
ICT
n Definition:
n Anticipate other team
members’ needs through
accurate knowledge about
their responsibilities
n Includes the ability to shift
workload among members
to achieve balance during
high periods of workload or
pressure
n Scrum:
n The team is seen as
multifunctional
n Self-organizing

19. In Practice: Backup Behaviour
n “Let the person that knows most about the task solve it! We cannot
afford several people doing the same thing in this project. We need to
continue working like we have done before” – scrum master
n “We are having problems in one of the modules, but other developers
do not want to fix the problem. They want to wait for the developer
who created the module” – scrum master
n “This was a shock to us. The end-users could not start testing, and
we had to spend a lot of time trying to fix this. It took almost a month
to locate the problems” - developer
n “It’s chaotic now. We work long hours, but I do not do too much. I
have done what I was supposed to, and I cannot help them. I do not
know anything about what they are doing, so it does not help if I try” –
developer
ICT

20. 20
Are Agile Teams more
Effective?

21. ICT
Productivity
Dybå, Tore and Dingsøyr, Torgeir, “Empirical Studies of Agile Software Development: A Systematic Review,” Information and
Software Technology, vol. 50, 2008, pp. 833-859.

22. IKT
Team
leadership
Team
orientation
Mutual
performance
monitoring
Back-up
behaviour
Adaptability
Shared
mental
models
Mutual
trust
Closed-loop
communication
Scrum
Case

23. ICT
Conclusion
n Difficult transition from individual work to teamwork
n There are many factors that influence team performance
in established team performance models
n Scrum has many mechanisms for teamwork in place, but
some were difficult to implement in the case organization
n There is a vast literature on teamwork that is very relevant
for agile development and that deserves more attention

24. 24
References and Resources

25. IKT
Rising, L. and Janoff, N.S., The Scrum software
development process for small teams, IEEE Software 17
(2000).!

26. n Moe, Nils Brede, Dingsøyr, Torgeir and Dybå, Tore, “A teamwork model for
understanding an agile team: A case study of a Scrum project,” Information and
Software Technology, vol. 52, 2010, pp. 480–491.
n Moe, Nils Brede, Dingsøyr, Torgeir and Dybå, Tore, “Overcoming Barriers to Self-
Management in Software Teams,” IEEE Software, vol. 26, no. ICT
6, 2009, pp. 20-26.