Non-Technical Individual Skills are Weakly Connected to the Maturity of Agile Practices

TL;DR

This study investigates the relationship between non-technical individual skills and the maturity of agile practices, finding that individual skills have limited predictive power and emphasizing team-level capacity instead.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that non-technical individual skills are weak predictors of agile practice maturity, suggesting a shift towards team-level skill assessment.

Findings

Non-technical individual skills weakly predict agile practice maturity.

Team-level capacity is more relevant than individual skills.

Limited explanatory power of individual skills in agile contexts.

Abstract

Context: Existing knowledge in agile software development suggests that individual competency (e.g. skills) is a critical success factor for agile projects. While assuming that technical skills are important for every kind of software development project, many researchers suggest that non-technical individual skills are especially important in agile software development. Objective: In this paper, we investigate whether non-technical individual skills can predict the use of agile practices. Method: Through creating a set of multiple linear regression models using a total of 113 participants from agile teams in six software development organizations from The Netherlands and Brazil, we analyzed the predictive power of non-technical individual skills in relation to agile practices. Results: The results show that there is surprisingly low power in using non-technical individual skills to predict (i.e. explain variance in) the mature use of agile practices in software development. Conclusions: Therefore, we conclude that looking at non-technical individual skills is not the optimal level of analysis when trying to understand, and explain, the mature use of agile practices in the software development context. We argue that it is more important to focus on the non-technical skills as a team-level capacity instead of assuring that all individuals possess such skills when understanding the use of the agile practices.