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The principles in the Agile Manifesto, the Scrum Guide and most other approaches to agile software development emphasize self-organizing teams, but rarely address issues of leadership. In this paper we report on a study of the nature of different aspects of leadership in agile teams. We used an established model of leadership, distinguishing transactional and transformational styles, and asked IT professionals a set of questions about the leadership they experience, both from direct supervisors (hierarchical leadership) and from the team itself (shared leadership). We determined correlation measures of these four types of leadership with the extent of agility in the whole organization. Our results show that agility is indeed related to the transformational style, but that the transactional style also plays a part, especially as shared leadership. Furthermore, even in highly agile software development, leadership by direct supervisors still plays an important role. We propose that, as software development becomes more agile, the transactional aspects of leadership may shift away from the leadership dyad between supervisor and employee into the agile team, while transformational leadership is important for both the team and supervisors. We discuss our results in light of applications for both research and practice.

This chapter deals with the Manifesto’s principle of self-organizing teams. In recent work, the authors examine the state of practice using data from a study of software professionals in Switzerland, especially addressing the issue of overall satisfaction. The chapter reveals that the most striking correlation to satisfaction is the level of adoption of self-managing teams, whereas the strongest hindrances to satisfaction are a lack of ability to change the organizational culture and lack of management support. The analysis shows that technical and collaborative practices were related to self-organization and satisfaction, but were not able to explain satisfaction by themselves. Even with strong technical and collaborative practices, however, satisfaction is not assured, demonstrating that goals of creating timely and successful products and services matter.

Over The Last decade, new software processes have appeared that emphasize collaboration among people involved in creating successful software. For example, agile methods stress collaboration between development teams and business clients, 1 and DevOps emphasizes better collaboration between development teams and deployment teams.