Overcoming Barriers to Self-Management in Software Teams

TLDR

The shift from command‑and‑control to self‑managing teams is hindered by a lack of redundancy and conflicts between team‑level and individual autonomy. The authors conducted a longitudinal case study across five projects in three small‑to‑medium software firms, collecting qualitative data from interviews and observations of developers and product managers implementing Scrum. Self‑management emerged as the main challenge in all projects, providing insights for companies adopting self‑managing teams and agile practices.

Abstract

This longitudinal case study reports on the challenges with self-management in five projects in experiences of three small and medium-sized software product companies implementing scrum, an agile process. Self-management emerged as the key challenge in all projects. In the transformation from traditional command-and-control management to collaborative self-managing teams, the main challenges were the absence of redundancy and conflict between team- and individual-level autonomy. Our findings are based primarily on qualitative analysis of interviews and observations with developers and product managers. These findings can provide important insight to companies considering self-managing teams and agile development practices.