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Balancing Individual and Collaborative Work in Agile Teams

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 31))

Abstract

In the agile approach, the self-organizing team itself decides how work is coordinated. For individuals in a team to be motivated and satisfied with their job they need to have control over their work and over the scheduling and implementation of their own tasks. However, individual and team level autonomy may conflict, and reduce the effectiveness of the team. Therefore, there is a need to investigate how to achieve empowerment at the individual and team levels simultaneously. An Australian software developer, Atlassian, has developed an interesting way of solving these problems with FedEx Day. Once every three months, developers get a day to work on whatever they like! Like an express courier, a developer must deliver something in a day. Developers then present their work to the rest of the company. Some of this work then ends up getting incorporated into the products.

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Barney, H.T., Moe, N.B., Dybå, T., Aurum, A., Winata, M. (2009). Balancing Individual and Collaborative Work in Agile Teams. In: Abrahamsson, P., Marchesi, M., Maurer, F. (eds) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. XP 2009. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 31. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01853-4_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01853-4_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-01852-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-01853-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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