Balancing Self-Organizing Agile Teams: A Grounded Theory

Self-organizing teams are one of the critical success factors on Agile projects but unfortunately little is known about the self-organizing nature of Agile teams and the challenges they face in industrial practice. Based on a Grounded Theory study of 40 Agile practitioners across 16 software development organizations in New Zealand and India, we describe how self-organizing Agile teams perform balancing acts between (a) freedom and responsibility (b) cross-functionality and specialization, and (c) continuous learning and iteration pressure, in an effort to maintain their self-organizing nature. We use our study to demonstrate the application of Grounded Theory to Software Engineering. We discuss the relationship between the balancing acts and the general principles of self-organization — requisite variety, redundancy of functions, minimum critical specification, and learning to learn — from the organizational perspective. We then discuss the balancing acts in relation to the specific conditions of self-organization — autonomy, cross-functionality, and self-transcendence — as applied in Agile software development. In doing so, we discuss the major challenges we encountered while performing Grounded Theory’s various activities, and present our strategies for overcoming these challenges.