Scrum Master Project Management Case Study Paper INSTRUCTIONS Each written assignment must be in a PDF format, have a 11pt font size, be double spaced and

Scrum Master Project Management Case Study Paper INSTRUCTIONS

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Readings: A teamwork model for understanding an agile team: A case study of a Scrum project

Please provide me with the following deliverables:

1- Article summary and takeaways

2-Highlight Scrum Master responsibilities and characteristics. Information and Software Technology 52 (2010) 480–491
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Information and Software Technology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/infsof
A teamwork model for understanding an agile team: A case study of a Scrum project
Nils Brede Moe *, Torgeir Dingsøyr, Tore Dybå
SINTEF, NO-7465 Trondheim, Norway
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 30 July 2009
Received in revised form 26 October 2009
Accepted 12 November 2009
Available online 20 November 2009
Keywords:
Agile software development
Scrum
Software engineering
Teamwork
Empirical software engineering
Case study
a b s t r a c t
Context: Software development depends significantly on team performance, as does any process that
involves human interaction.
Objective: Most current development methods argue that teams should self-manage. Our objective is
thus to provide a better understanding of the nature of self-managing agile teams, and the teamwork
challenges that arise when introducing such teams.
Method: We conducted extensive fieldwork for 9 months in a software development company that introduced Scrum. We focused on the human sensemaking, on how mechanisms of teamwork were understood by the people involved.
Results: We describe a project through Dickinson and McIntyre’s teamwork model, focusing on the interrelations between essential teamwork components. Problems with team orientation, team leadership and
coordination in addition to highly specialized skills and corresponding division of work were important
barriers for achieving team effectiveness.
Conclusion: Transitioning from individual work to self-managing teams requires a reorientation not only
by developers but also by management. This transition takes time and resources, but should not be
neglected. In addition to Dickinson and McIntyre’s teamwork components, we found trust and shared
mental models to be of fundamental importance.
Ó 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Software development depends significantly on team performance, as does any process that involves human interaction. A
common definition of a team is ‘‘a small number of people with
complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose,
set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable” [22].
The traditional perspective on software development is rooted
in the rationalistic paradigm, which promotes a plan-driven product-line approach to software development using a standardized,
controllable, and predictable software engineering process [15].
Today, this traditional mechanistic worldview is challenged by
the agile perspective that accords primacy to uniqueness, ambiguity, complexity, and change, as opposed to prediction, verifiability,
and control. The goal of optimization is being replaced by those of
flexibility and responsiveness [33].
Setting up a work team is usually motivated by benefits such as
increased productivity, innovation, and employee satisfaction.
Research on software development teams has found that team performance is linked with the effectiveness of teamwork coordination [19,25]. In the traditional plan-driven approach, work is
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +47 93028687; fax: +47 73592977.
E-mail addresses: nilsm@sintef.no (N.B. Moe), torgeird@sintef.no (T. Dingsøyr),
tored@sintef.no (T. Dybå).
0950-5849/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2009.11.004
coordinated in a hierarchy that involves a command-and-control
style of management in which there is a clear separation of roles
[33,34]. In the agile approach, work is coordinated by the self-managing team, in which the team itself decides how work is coordinated [8].
A team that follows a plan-driven model often consists of independently focused self-managing professionals, and a transition to
self-managing teams is one of the biggest challenges when introducing agile (change-driven) development [33]. Neither culture
nor mind-sets of people can be changed easily, which makes the
move to agile methodologies all the more formidable for many
organizations [8]. In addition, it is not sufficient to put individuals
together in a group, tag them ‘‘self-managing”, and expect that
they will automatically know how to coordinate and work effectively as an agile team.
Our objective is to provide a better understanding of the nature
of self-managing agile teams, which can in turn benefit the effective application of agile methods in software development. To this
end, we conducted a longitudinal study that draws on the general
literature of teamwork and self-managing teams. Such a study can
provide valuable insights for understanding the challenge of introducing the self-managing agile team. We sought to answer the following research question:
How can we explain the teamwork challenges that arise when
introducing a self-managing agile team?
N.B. Moe et al. / Information and Software Technology 52 (2010) 480–491
481
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2
gives an overview of the literature on teamwork and agile software
development. Section 3 describes our research question and method in detail. Section 4 presents results from a nine-month fieldwork of teamwork in a Scrum team. Section 5 contains a
discussion of the findings. Section 6 concludes and provides suggestions for further work.
pointed out that self-managing groups may end up controlling
group members more rigidly than they do under traditional management styles, while Markham and Markham [29] suggested that
it may be difficult to incorporate both individual autonomy and
group autonomy in the same work group. For Individuals to be
motivated and satisfied with their jobs they need to have control
over their own work and over the scheduling and implementation
of their own tasks [1,26].
2. Background: teamwork and agile software development
2.2. Teamwork in agile development: the Scrum team
In this section, we give a short introduction to the field of teamwork, teamwork in agile development, and the teamwork model
that is used as the basis for our work.
In a software team, the members are jointly responsible for the
end product and must develop shared mental models by negotiating shared understandings about both the teamwork and the task
[28]. Project goals, system requirements, project plans, project
risks, individual responsibilities, and project status must be visible
and understood by all parties involved [21].
Most current development methods have it as a premise that
software teams should self-organize or self-manage [36,42].
Scrum, which is a project-management-oriented agile development method, was inspired by a range of fields, such as complexity
theory, system dynamics, and Nonaka and Takeuchi’s theory of
knowledge creation [35], and has adapted aspects of these fields
to a setting of software development. Self-management is a defining characteristic in Scrum. Compared with traditional commandand-control oriented management, Scrum represents a radically
new approach for planning and managing software projects, because it brings decision-making authority to the level of operational problems and uncertainties.
Rising and Janoff [36] describe Scrum as a development process
for small teams, which includes a series of short development
phases or iterations (‘‘sprints”). A Scrum team is given significant
authority and responsibility for many aspects of their work, such
as planning, scheduling, assigning tasks to members, and making
decisions: ‘‘The team is accorded full authority to do whatever it
decides is necessary to achieve the goal” [43].
However, despite the popularity of the method, a systematic
review of empirical studies of agile development [16] found
only one case study of Scrum in the research literature prior to
2006.
2.1. Teamwork
The topic of teamwork has attracted research from several disciplines [10,17,41]. The concept of teamwork carries with it a set of
values that encourage listening and responding constructively to
views expressed by others, giving others the benefit of the doubt,
providing support, and recognizing the interests and achievements
of others [22]. Such values are important because they promote
individual performance, which boosts team performance, and they
help teams to perform well as a group, and good team performance
boosts the performance of the organization.
Research on teamwork includes the development of tests to
identify personality characteristics, because it has often been argued that good teams need a certain blend of personalities. Examples are the Belbin test [7] and the Myers–Briggs Type indicator.
There is also a great deal of research on climate at work group
and team level. The most studied model of team climate is that
of [48] who suggests that four climate factors (vision, participative
safety, task orientation, and support for innovation) are essential
for team innovation to occur.
Furthermore, there are studies of teams over time, which indicate that teams go through set phases. The most well-known of
these studies are those of Tuckman [46], who identified the phases
as forming, storming, norming, and performing. Other studies have
focused on the relationships between team members and argue
that group cohesiveness is important for team success (cited in
[41]). However, the use of teams does not always result in success
for the organization [17]. Team performance is complex, and the
actual performance of a team depends not only on the competence
of the team itself in managing and executing its work, but also on
the organizational context provided by management.
Much research has been devoted to what is described as selfmanaging, autonomous, or empowered teams [17,23,26,45,47].
One of the reasons that the use of self-managing teams has become
popular is that some research suggests that their use promotes
more satisfied employees, lower turnover, and lower absenteeism
[10]. Others also claim that self-managing teams are a prerequisite
for the success of innovative projects [20,44].
Although the majority of studies report that using self-managing teams has positive effects, some studies offer a more mixed
assessment; such teams can be difficult to implement, and they
risk failure when used in inappropriate situations or without sufficient leadership and support [18]. In addition, research on team
performance indicates that the effects of autonomous work groups
are highly situational dependent and that the effects of autonomous work-group practices depend on such factors as the nature
of the workforce and the nature of the organization [10,17]. Further, autonomy on the individual level may conflict with autonomy
on the group level. When a team as a whole is given a great deal of
autonomy, it does not follow that the individual team members are
given high levels of individual autonomy. Barker [5], for example,
2.3. Dickinson and McIntyre’s teamwork model
The issue of what processes and components comprise teamwork and how teamwork contributes to team effectiveness and
team performance has been much studied [9,19,26,30,39], but
there is no consensus concerning its conceptual structure [38].
Salas et al. [40] identify 136 different models in their literature review and present a representative sample of 11 models and
frameworks.
Using recent research and previous reviews, Dickinson and
McIntyre [13] identified and defined seven core components of
teamwork. Using these components and their relationships as a basis, they proposed the teamwork model that is used in this work.
The model consists of a learning loop of the following basic teamwork components: communication, team orientation, team leadership, monitoring, feedback, backup, and coordination (Fig. 1).
We selected the Dickinson and McIntyre teamwork model for
the following reasons:
1. It includes the most common elements that are considered in
most research on teamwork processes [38,39]. In addition, it
considers important elements that are required in self-managed
teams: team orientation, functional redundancy and backup
behavior [32,35], communication, feedback and learning [33],
and shared leadership [22]. Further, the model covers important
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Fig. 1. The Dickinson and McIntyre teamwork model [13].
elements that are found in software teams, such as coordination
of work [25].
2. It specifies what teamwork skills should be observed, in that the
model is presented with a conceptual framework for developing
measures of teamwork performance that can ensure effective
individual and team performance [13], pp. 22.
3. It considers the teamwork process as a learning loop in which
teams are characterized as adaptable and dynamically changing
over time. Continuous self-management requires a capacity for
double-loop learning that allows operating norms and rules to
change along with transformation in the wider environment
[32].
Each component of the model is explained in Table 1. According
to Dickinson and McIntyre, team leadership and team orientation
are ‘input’ components of teamwork because at least one of these
attitudes is required for an individual to participate in a team task.
Team leadership can be shown by several team members that is
also a prerequisite for a team’s being self-managing. In such teams,
team members should share the authority to make decisions,
rather than having: (a) a centralized decision structure in which
one person (e.g. the team leader) makes all the decisions or (b) a
decentralized decision structure in which all team members make
decisions regarding their work individually and independently of
other team members [20]. So, while the traditional perspective of
a single leader suggests that the leadership function is a specialized
role that cannot be shared without jeopardizing group effectiveness, when leadership is shared, group effectiveness is achieved
by empowering the members of the team to share the tasks and
responsibilities of leadership [22].
In the Dickinson and McIntyre model, the components of monitoring, feedback, and backup are the intermediate processes for
ensuring effective teamwork. Finally, the ‘output’ component is
coordination because it defines the performance of the team. Communication is a transversal component of particular importance,
because it links the other components. To build software effectively, there is a need for tight coordination among the various efforts involved so that the work is completed and fits together [25].
Table 1
The Dickinson and McIntyre teamwork model: definitions of teamwork components.
Team orientation: Refers to the team tasks and the attitudes that team members have towards one another. It reflects an acceptance of team norms, the level of group
cohesiveness, and the importance of team membership, e.g.
assigning high priority to team goals
participating willingly in all relevant aspects of the team
Team leadership: Involves providing direction, structure, and support for other team members. It does not necessarily refer to a single individual with formal authority
over others. Team leadership can be shown by several team members, e.g.
explaining to other team members exactly what is needed from them during an assignment
listening to the concerns of other team members
Monitoring: Refers to observing the activities and performance of other team members and recognizing when a team member performs correctly. It implies that team
members are individually competent and that they may subsequently provide feedback and backup, e.g.
being aware of other team members’ performance
recognizing when a team member performs correctly
Feedback: Involves the giving, seeking, and receiving of information among team members. Giving feedback refers to providing information regarding other members’
performance. Seeking feedback refers to requesting input or guidance regarding performance and to accepting positive and negative information regarding
performance, e.g.
responding to other members’ requests for information about their performance
accepting time-saving suggestions offered by other team members
Backup: Involves being available to assist other team members. This implies that members have an understanding of other members’ tasks. It also implies that team
members are willing and able to provide and seek assistance when needed, e.g.
filling in for another member who is unable to perform the task
helping another member correct a mistake
Coordination: Refers to team members executing their activities in a timely and integrated manner. It implies that the performance of some team members influences
the performance of others. This may involve an exchange of information that subsequently influences another member’s performance. Coordination represents
the output of the model and reflects the execution of team activities such that members respond as a function of the behavior of others, e.g.
passing performance-relevant data to other members in an efficient manner
facilitating the performance of other members’ jobs
Communication: Involves the exchange of information between two or more team members in the prescribed manner and using appropriate terminology. Often, the
purpose of communication is to clarify or acknowledge the receipt of information, e.g.
verifying information prior to making a report
acknowledging and repeating messages to ensure understanding
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Table 2
The use of Klein and Myers’ principles in this field research.
The principles for interpretive field research [24]
How we used each principle
1. The fundamental principle of the hermeneutic circle
We improved our understanding of the project by moving back and forth between phases and
events. The project had three main phases, which had different teamwork characteristics. For
each of the phases, we described concrete events. The data analysis involved multiple
researchers having ongoing discussions about the findings
To clarify for our readers how situations emerged, we describe the work and organization of
the company, as well as the context of the project we used to study teamwork
The researchers’ understanding of the project developed through observations, interviews and
discussions with the team participants in the coffee breaks and during lunch. We discussed
project status, progress, and how issues were perceived by team participants
We describe our findings and relate them to the model of Dickinson and McIntyre [13]
We use Dickinson and McIntyre’s model to identify areas of investigation in the case. Our
assumptions are also based on the general literature of teamwork and self-management
Our social background is European
To collect multiple, and possibly contradictory interpretations of events we collected data
from all participants in the project and from multiple data sources. The case study narrative
and findings have been presented to Alpha and led to feedback
By means of the analysis, we were sensitive to how roles and personalities affected attitudes to
teamwork to discover false preconceptions
In addition to observations, we also performed interviews with different roles at different
levels, and multiple interviews with all team members. This increased the chance of unveiling
possibly incorrect or incomplete meanings
2. The principle of contextualization
3. The principle of interaction between researchers and subjects
4. The principle of abstraction and generalization
5. The principle of dialogical reasoning
6. The principle of multiple interpretations
7. The principle of suspicion
In the rest of the paper, we will explain the challenges that arise
when introducing agile me…
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