Team Composition and Team Role Allocation in Agile Project Teams

Brian Turrel30 March 2015

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Role of a Scrum Team

• Self-Governing• Cross-Functional– No differentiated roles except Scrum Master and

Product Owner• Accountable

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Team Member Selection Criteria

• Study of Brazilian development teams from a variety of organizations between 2007 and 2012

• Looks at different selection criteria for selecting team members and their prevalence among organizations

• Correlates different selection criteria to project success metrics

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Team Member Selection Criteria

• Team building criteria in software projects: A mix-method replicated study– Fabio da Silva et al, Journal of Information and

Software Technology, Vol. 55, 2013.

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Team Member Selection Criteria – Research Questions

• Two Research Questions– What are the criteria used by software project

managers in practice to select individuals to build software teams?

– How is the consistent use of team building criteria related to project success?

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Team Member Selection Criteria

• Key Findings– Individual factors were more correlated to project

success than organizational factors– Technical aspects were most correlated with

project success– Agile teams were less dependent of team

selection criteria than traditional teams

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Team Member Selection - Methodology

• Four stages– Stage 1: Interviews with project managers and

team members– Stage 2: Survey to correlate criteria with project

success for separate list of organizations– Stage 3: Mapping study of previous studies for

team member selection criteria– Stage 4: Replication of Stage 2 survey with

additional criteria

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Team Member Selection - Methodology

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Team Member Selection – Stage 1

• Interviews– Conducted with a project manager and two team

members from each organization (to validate the degree that criteria were used)

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Team Member Selection – Stage 1

• Individual Factors– Innate: Personality, Behavior– Technical: Technical Profile, Productivity

• Organizational Factors:– Operational: Individual Cost, Availability– Strategic: Project Importance, Customer

Importance

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Team Member Selection – Stage 1

• Relative Prevalence of Criteria– Technical Profile– Personality– Behavior– Customer Importance– Productivity– Availability– Individual Cost– Project Importance

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Team Member Selection – Stage 2

• Project Success Criteria– Costs– Time– Scope– Team Satisfaction– Client Satisfaction– PM Satisfaction

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Team Member Selection – Stage 2

• Correlation of selection criteria and success goals

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Team Member Selection – Stage 3

• Validate list of selection criteria through literature survey– Identified two additional selection criteria• Task Preference• Peer Indication

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Team Member Selection – Stage 4

• Replicate Stage 2 survey results with additional criteria and methodology improvements– Distinguished Agile and traditional teams

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Team Member Selection – Stage 4

• Correlation of selection criteria, success goals, and development method

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Issues with this study

• Most rigorous elements of the study were related to identifying selection criteria (stages 1 and 3), which was the least interesting aspect of the study

• Sample sizes for the correlations were relatively small

• Surveys in stages 2 and 4 did not clearly replicate their findings

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Other Interesting Takeaways

• Project managers generally understood that behavior and personality were important to project success, but often felt poorly equipped to formally evaluate team member candidates on that basis

• Agile teams were less dependent on team member selection criteria for success– One potential explanation is that the self-

organizing nature of Agile teams allows members to find a contributing role

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Self-Organizing Roles on Agile Teams

• Self-Organizing Roles on Agile Software Development Teams, Rashina Hoda et al., IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol 38, March 2013

• Self-organized teams are part of the Agile principles, but how does self-organization contribute to team success?

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Conclusions

• Agile team become self-organizing as team members take on these roles– Mentor– Coordinator– Translator– Champion– Promoter– Terminator

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Looking at Self-Organizing Teams

• Self-organizing teams evaluated from a variety of perspectives– Socio-Technical System– Organizational Theory– Knowledge Management– Complex Adaptive Systems– Software Development

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Research Method

• Grounded Theory– General methodology of analysis– Linked with data collection– Generates an inductive theory

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Data Collection

• Interviews with 58 participants from 23 organizations in New Zealand and India

• Field observations• Iterative process of data collection

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Data Analysis

• Open coding• Selective coding• Theoretical coding

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Results

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Issues with this Study

• Open-ended process• No clear hypothesis or experimental method• Results are entirely qualitative

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Task Allocation in Scrum Teams

• An Empirical Analysis of Task Allocation in Scrum-based Agile Programming– Jun Lin et al., unpublished

• Study in an academic setting at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore

• Students who were new to Scrum recorded completion of various tasks along with the tasks’ perceived difficulty and their confidence in completing them

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Task Allocation in Scrum Teams

• Key findings– Students attempted to allocate tasks according to

the assignees competence• Tasks with high difficulty and short deadlines tended to

be assigned to students with high technical productivity

– Teams with lower overall competence collaborated more

– Students with higher technical productivity reported higher morale on completion of a sprint

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Task Allocation Study - Methodology

• Students self-organized into teams of 5-7• Students used a proprietary project tracking

system that tracked task assignment and collaboration activities, and recorded student observations about mood, confidence, and expected time to complete tasks.

• Quality of task completion was determined through peer evaluation and final grade.

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Task Allocation Study – Definitions

• Competence– The likelihood that a student will complete a given

task with acceptable quality by the deadline• Technical Productivity– The amount of work that a student will be able to

complete during a development iteration

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Task Allocation Study - Findings

• Allocation of difficult and time-sensitive tasks tended to follow competence and technical productivity

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Task Allocation Study - Findings

• Groups with less team competence collaborated more

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Task Allocation Study - Findings

• Morale increased after a sprint for team members with high technical productivity

• Morale decreased among teams with high collaboration

Before Sprint After Sprint

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Issues with this Study

• Academic setting among novice developers with limited experience in Scrum

• No comparison to other Agile or traditional development methodologies

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Task Allocation Study – Conclusions

• Scrum provides a process for tasks to be allocated efficiently according to the capability and productivity of the various team members– May mask weak performance by low-productivity

team members• Scrum provides emotional incentives for high-

productivity team members