An Approach on Applying Organizational Learning in Agile Software Organizations

Agile software development (ASD) has been in evidence over the past years by encouraging changes on how software is developed [1]. However, agile methods strongly focus on empowering the project team in achieving its goals [2]. Little attention is given to creating insights and experiences to the organizational level [3]. Therefore, there is a challenge to overcome the barriers to scale the knowledge on the group level to the organizational level effectively [4]. Some of the problems have been bypassed through the adaptation of practices such as job rotation to increase knowledge redundancy [5], scrum-of-scrums [6], workshops [7] and communities of practice [8] to support multi-team issues. However, they are not effective in all contexts and must be carefully adapted and tailored. For this reason, specific strategies are needed to spread useful knowledge for the organizational level [9]. In this context, Organizational Learning (OL) may be very relevant to support the generation of organizational competitive advantage, since OL helps improving organization actions through better knowledge and understanding [10].