Team Autonomy Research Paper

Team Autonomy

—Advanced Software Project Management course

Yi Chen 9401216131

Software Engineer

BLEKINGE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Karlskrona, Sweden [e-mail] November 20, 2015

Abstract—Agile software development supplies a new method for planning and managing software projects. When running a large-scale agile project, it focus less on strict control and up-front plans but put much emphasis on coordination, learning, and informal collaboration. Team autonomous is an essential part and efficient method for agile software development. In the last ten years, autonomous teams have taken the center stage in software engineer when they were incorporated as a hallmark of agile method. [1][2] The main focus of the essay is about the

And the team members should be able to manage their own workload, participate in the team decision making, and shift work among themselves. It will take great benefits when using team autonomy as a method to be applied in the large-scale agile software development. And there are different levels of team autonomy. Different levels of autonomy will have different impact on the agile project development. So, it is critical to balance how much autonomy shall a team have. Last not least, it is essential to find a way to achieve the autonomy and then analyze how to apply it both on project and organizational levels.

The essay is mainly divided into four parts—1. The benefits of team autonomy in a agile software organization 2.Introduction about different levels of team autonomy and clarify their corresponding prerequisites 3. Describe the type of leadership on an project level and on the organizational level and concrete practices that support team autonomy 4. Conclusion of the whole

[9] The management will set the scale of decisions and require team to make a certain decision which is related to the project goal and depend on the project process or strategies. It will limit the autonomy but lead all the discussion at the same direction. Sometimes, this kind of external autonomy is beneficial because it provide important feedback to help project completion or encourage creativity within the team by discouraging groupthink. [9] However, if there is a task about highly complex software development, where the requirements of customer may change frequently, the control and decision-making from external may become ineffective in this occasion. It is better make decision and control inside the group which is easily to deal with the uncertain change of