Leadership in Kanban Software Development Projects: A Quasi-controlled Experiment

Useless actions and work in software development projects do not increase the value for the customer. While getting rid of such waste may sound simple, even recognizing the waste is considered a challenging issue. Once recognized with its causes, projects are more aware of the signs of waste: the pitfalls are avoidable by knowing their reasons. On the other hand, self-organization and empowering the teams emerge in a modern Kanban-driven software development project. This makes it relevant to ask whether sacrificing project resources for leadership adds any value. Hence, this paper conducts a quasi-controlled experiment with two leadership settings in order to find out differences between waste, its causes and effects. The results from the empirical analysis show that waste is present in each project but the amount and significance of waste can be reduced with the right leadership even in self-organized teams of