Autopoiesies Aspects on Agile Software Development Teams

Abstract

Self-organizing teams have been recognized and studied in various forms. The brief history of self-organizing teams and their recent popularity with agile method warrants some amount of research in this paper within software engineering. In particular; there is an increased interest in research on agile software development teams. In dearth of research on self-organizing in agile teams, this paper shows; how agile teams organize themselves. This paper presents results of a grounded theory, study involving the 58 agile practitioners from 23 different software organizations in New Zealand and India conducted over period of four years. In this paper, agile methods are developed as response to the weakness of traditional software development models. Agile methods are better than the traditional software development models and provide changes through an iterative and incremental style of development. It allows the iterations to focus on this prioritized customer. Agile methods encourage continuous customer involvement and feedback. Some flavors of agile methods included in this paper are: Dynamic software development method (Dsdm), Feature driven development (Fdd), Adaptive software development. These roles of Autopoisies are: 1. Mentor, Co-coordinator, 2. Translator, 3. Champion, Promoter, and Terminator.

Keywords: Self-organizing, team roles, software engineering, Agile software
development, grounded theory