Building blocks for self-organizing software development teams a framework model and empirical pilot study

Self-organization is one of the foundations of agile software development. Many positive outcomes have been associated with having teams operating at high levels of self-organization. This paper reports the results of a pilot study which reviews the existing body of empirical literature and presents a novel model for building self-organizing teams. The model is empirically validated in two case studies performed in Software Factory, an academic but close-to-industry experimental R&D laboratory. It is shown that autonomy together with communication and collaboration are the major components for building self-organizing software development teams.