Attaining High-performing Software Teams with Agile and Lean Practices: An Empirical Case Study

This paper presents an empirical study on how selforganized software teams could attain high performance using agile and lean practices. In particular, the paper qualitatively examines characteristics of high performance and selforganization in one project team. The case under study is a customer-driven student project, carried out to develop an alpha-version prototype. The paper also studies how certain agile software practices aid in initialising selforganization in the team. The main results indicate that self-organization as supported by certain Agile and Lean practices helps teams in achieving higher performance.