Are Agile Teams More Effective? Findings from the Teamwork Literature and Empirical Studies of Agile Teams

Agile development methods such as Scrum and eXtreme programming has become the standard way of development in many countries. When more software is developed according to agile methods, this leads to an increased focus on teamwork, as agile teams work very closely together. This talk will provide a short overview of findings on team effectiveness, explain how they relate to agile software development, and give examples from studies of agile teams on issues that are challenging to achieve in practice. From a teamwork perspective, is there any reason to believe that agile teams are more effective than traditional teams?

About the speaker

Torgeir Dingsøyr is a senior scientist at the SINTEF Research Foundation, Norway where he works with software process improvement and knowledge management projects. In particular, he has focused on agile software development through a number of case studies, co-authoring of a systematic review of empirical studies, co-editing of the book Agile Software Development: Current Research and Future Directions, as well as co-editing the special issue on Agile Methods in the Journal of Systems and Software in 2012. He has been an active member of the agile research community, and was co-organizing chair of the 11th International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP2010) as well as co-producer of the research at work stage at Agile2011. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Knowledge Management in Medium-Sized Software Consulting Companies at the Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he is now Adjunct Professor.

Please contact orla.odwyer@nuigalway.ie if you would like to attend