Understanding Self-organizing Teams in Agile Software Development

Traditional software teams consist of independently focused self-managing professionals with highindividual but low team autonomy. A challenge with introducing agile software development is that itrequires a high level of both individual and team autonomy. This paper studies the barriers withintroducing self-organizing teams in agile software development and presents data from a seven monthethnographic study of professional developers in a Scrum team. We found the most important barrier to be the highly specialized skills of the developers and the corresponding division of work. In addition we found a lack of system for team support, and reduced external autonomy to be important barriers for introducing selforganizing teams. These findings have implications for software development managers and practitioners.