The Theory of One Team: Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams

<p>Team co-location is a hallmark of Agile software development that advocates face-to-face interaction and close collaboration among team members. Distributed teams, however, use Agile methods despite the separation of team members through space, time and culture. Little is known about how distributed teams use Agile methods for software development. A Grounded Theory research study that involved 55 participants from 38 different software companies in the USA, India, and Australia was carried out to investigate the key concern of distributed teams in Agile software development. This thesis proposes “The Theory of One Team” which explains how a distributed team in Agile software development adopts explicit strategies for bridging spatial, temporal, and socio-cultural distances, while facing critical impact factors, in order to become one team. This thesis primarily describes how a distributed team resolves the key concern of becoming one team. This thesis also provides the members of a distributed team with techniques for building trust with one another. In addition, this thesis serves to inform senior managers about the importance of supporting distributed teams in Agile software development.</p>

The Theory of One Team: Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams

<p>Team co-location is a hallmark of Agile software development that advocates face-to-face interaction and close collaboration among team members. Distributed teams, however, use Agile methods despite the separation of team members through space, time and culture. Little is known about how distributed teams use Agile methods for software development. A Grounded Theory research study that involved 55 participants from 38 different software companies in the USA, India, and Australia was carried out to investigate the key concern of distributed teams in Agile software development. This thesis proposes “The Theory of One Team” which explains how a distributed team in Agile software development adopts explicit strategies for bridging spatial, temporal, and socio-cultural distances, while facing critical impact factors, in order to become one team. This thesis primarily describes how a distributed team resolves the key concern of becoming one team. This thesis also provides the members of a distributed team with techniques for building trust with one another. In addition, this thesis serves to inform senior managers about the importance of supporting distributed teams in Agile software development.</p>

HOW COVID-19 ENABLED A GLOBAL STUDENT DESIGN TEAM TO ACHIEVE BREAKTHROUGH INNOVATION

This is a qualitative single case study of a geographically distributed student team that experienced a quite different graduate course, compared to previous year's. This was due to the restrictions placed upon them following coronavirus lockdowns. With already ongoing research, and continuous development of the course, the authors had documented individual reflections and identified patterns and behaviours that seemingly determined the quality of the end result, as well as the students expectations and experiences. Semi-structured interviews, surveys and the author's individual reflection notes were already in place as part of the larger research scope and when the student team during the covid-19 year showed unexpected performance and results, the authors decided to pause the larger research scope and focus on this unique single case and capture those learnings. Not knowing how the Covid-19 situation evolves and leaning on insights from previous years, as well as this unique year, the aim with this paper is to describe the unique Covid-19 year amd share knowledge that can help improve and evolve the development of this longlived collaborative graduate student course, and other similar distributed team contexts.

THE POSITIVE IMPACT OF AGILE RETROSPECTIVES ON THE COLLABORATION OF DISTRIBUTED DEVELOPMENT TEAMS – A PRACTICAL APPROACH ON THE EXAMPLE OF BOSCH ENGINEERING GMBH

To counteract competitive pressure, increasing customer requirements and growing product complexity successful distributed collaboration in product development is vital. Companies have to face new challenges, such as efficiency losses in communication. To overcome these challenges agile working practices, such as agile retrospectives, could be beneficial. The objective of this scientific work is to evaluate the benefit of agile working practices on the example of agile retrospectives, for the improvement of collaboration in distributed development teams. Based on literature analysis, qualitative and quantitative expert interviews following the DRM by Blessing and Chakrabarti, this scientific work shows that agile working practices have a high potential to improve distributed collaboration. To address this potential, several virtual agile retrospectives are developed and conducted within a distributed team at Bosch Engineering GmbH. The evaluation of this approach results in a high potential of agile retrospectives indicating an improvement tendency. Especially iteratively implemented virtual agile retrospectives have a positive impact on successful distributed collaboration.

Initiated and received task interdependence and distributed team performance: the mediating roles of different forms of role clarity

Distributed agile teams are increasingly employed in organizations, partly due to the increased focus on digital transformation. However, research findings about the performance of such teams appear to be inconsistent, calling for more research to investigate the conditions under which distributed agile teams may thrive. Given that task coordination is particularly challenging when team members are not co-located, the present study investigates the roles of the two types of task interdependence, i.e., initiated versus received task interdependence. Survey results from 191 participants working in distributed agile teams within three companies in Norway confirm our hypotheses. Specifically, we show that high initiated task interdependence is associated with higher role clarity of others, while received task interdependence is associated with higher role clarity of self, and that both subsequently result in higher team performance in distributed agile teams. Thus, we argue that each type of task interdependence contributes in a unique way to team performance in distributed agile teams.

Managing Social Distance in Geographically Distributed Teams

The chapter highlights the social distance, i.e. lack of emotional connection, formed among individuals working remotely in a geographically distributed team. The virtuality and cultural diversity of such teams creates limited opportunities for dispersed members to build social ties with remote team members leading to formation of ‘us' versus ‘them' attitudes which corrode team effectiveness. Based on a survey of 482 Indian IT professionals working in distributed teams, we find that social distance negatively impacts team effectiveness. Further, the results of the study show that practices such as task interdependence, inclusive communication, contextual information and shared identity can moderate the negative relationship between social distance and team effectiveness at varying levels of perceived status equality among individuals working in geographically distributed teams. The chapter provides recommendations for the effective management of geographically distributed teams whereby managers act as a bridge between the team members to overcome social distance.