Why are agile developers so excited?
- What aspects of agile dev are related to team cohesion?
- What makes a team really gel on a project?
Speed & ease of interaction:
- whole team involvement
- trust, openness, respect
- culture of action & change
- immediate action that they could take in the near future
- individuals could see themselves make a change
- agile participants had a more collective viewpoint
Social identity theory
- in-group out-group bias: just naming different groups biases the dynamic
- agile culture increases the strength of the project group identity rather than dev, biz, etc
Planning
Planning game makes the conflicts more visible and allows developers to take more ownership over development process
Planning responds to team needs — tasks are neither to hard (anxiety) or too easy (boredom) — increases feeling of flow
Short term planning increased willingness to compromise — team interactions more relaxed
- increased feelings of security & comfort
Long term planning hard to do as a team
- gives rise to feelings of insecure, apprehension, stress
- having to make decisions for things 6 months in advance
Regular Iterations
No definite end goal caused loss of “buzz” — group motivation & focus hard to maintain
Consistent delivery over multiple iterations gave rise to feelings of confidence & security
Whole team awareness
Constant feedback to individuals that all team members share awareness of team activity & share commitment to goals
Supported by daily group standup:
- Forum for non-task based issues
- Extra motivation (disapproval from team) and validation of requests
- Recognition of what’s possible and what’s not
- Communication is not need-based — allows other topics
Group standup supported by chunked activities
- Something to report if small enough chunks
- Loss of motivation if stuck on same task for whole week
Information Radiators: noticeable measures of progress
- completed stories “give endorphin rush”
- also supports awareness of individual contributions to team goal (others as well as self)
Performance
Increased sense of control & self-efficacy improves performance
Conclusion & Questions
http://www.ewhitworth.com/html/ma.html
Have a list of weaknesses at end of project, for example:
- agile focussed on developers — makes them feel good, but QA & documentation felt isolated
- high-level of interaction sometimes resulted in burn-out
Data collected from:
- 5 participants from one company
- 17 participants each from different companies
Agile is a method that helps people work as a team in the software development environment
Frank Maurer (Uni. Calgary): agile planner — distributed planning for agile teams
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