On the Relationship Between Organizational Structure Patterns and Architecture in Agile Teams

Abstract

Forming members of an organisation into coherent groups or teams is an important issue in any large-scale software engineering endeavour, especially so in agile software development where teams rely heavily on self-organisation and organisational flexibility. But is there a recurrent organisational structure pattern in agile software engineering teams? and if so what does that pattern imply, in terms of software architecture quality? We address these questions using mixed-methods research in industry featuring interviews, surveys, and Delphi studies of real agile teams. In our study of 30 agile software teams we found that, out of seven organisational structure patterns that recur across our dataset, a single organisational pattern occurs over 37% of the time. This pattern: (a) reflects young communities (1-12 months old); (b) disappears in established ones (13+ months); and (c) reflects the highest number of architecture smells reported. Finally, we observe a negative correlation between a proposed organisational measure and architecture smells. On the one hand, these insights may serve to aid architects in designing not only their architectures but also their communities to best support their co-evolution. On the other hand, we observe that organisational structures in software engineering influence much more than simply software architectures, and we expect our results to lay the foundations of more structured and rigorous approaches to organisational structure studies and use in software engineering research and practice.

Detecting and Optimising Team Interactions in Software Development

“…Designing and maintaining an e cient organisational structure is essential for highly performant software development teams [20,22,27,40,44,49]. This is especially the case in agile software development teams whichsimilar to Open Source Software teams [33]-have a strong focus on self-organisation and organisational exibility [46]. The key concept behind agile software engineering is a high level of adaptivity, continuous evolution, and exibility to changes in requirements [5].…”

A theory of organizational structures for development and infrastructure professionals

“…Therefore, due to such recent changes, there is a need to investigate how these companies are structuring development and infrastructure groups regarding operations activities, such as provisioning, deployment, and monitoring. Such investigation is relevant for practitioners, especially considering that commonly adopted structures may not necessarily yield the best results [4].…”