Agile Ways of Working: A Team Maturity Perspective

TL;DR

This study investigates how team psychological development levels influence agile practices, finding strong correlations with iterative development and retrospectives, and emphasizes adapting agile management to team maturity levels.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence linking team maturity to specific agile practices, highlighting the importance of tailoring agile approaches based on team development stages.

Findings

Strong correlation between team maturity and iterative development.

Strong correlation between team maturity and retrospectives.

Agile practices vary with team development stages.

Abstract

With the agile approach to managing software development projects comes an increased dependability on well functioning teams, since many of the practices are built on teamwork. The objective of this study was to investigate if, and how, team development from a group psychological perspective is related to some work practices of agile teams. Data were collected from 34 agile teams (200 individuals) from six software development organizations and one university in both Brazil and Sweden using the Group Development Questionnaire (Scale IV) and the Perceptive Agile Measurement (PAM). The result indicates a strong correlation between levels of group maturity and the two agile practices \emph{iterative development} and \emph{retrospectives}. We, therefore, conclude that agile teams at different group development stages adopt parts of team agility differently, thus confirming previous studies but with more data and by investigating concrete and applied agile practices. We thereby add evidence to the hypothesis that an agile implementation and management of agile projects need to be adapted to the group maturity levels of the agile teams.