Self-selection in Software Development Teams : A Case Study Regarding Challenges and Possibilities with Reorganization through Self-selection

Abstract: The software development business today is a land of constant change. The change requires the organizations who operate within this business to be flexible and quick to respond. This has led to multiple agile organization methods being developed, one of them is DevOps. A cornerstone in DevOps is self-selection - a method for assembling teams. This method gives hope of less administration, autonomy in teams and increased performance. In this essay we investigate the promises - the challenges and the possibilities - of self-selection. The case in this essay is IFS - a big software development company, implementing self-selection department by department also facing the challenges of combining traditional project values with the short iterations of an agile method. Our qualitative study investigates which the main challenges and possibilities are. We also investigate how these findings should be managed. How could the diversity, team size and autonomy be enhanced or diminished? We found that some parts of the case, and practice, were like our prior literature - but some were not. For example, the feeling of being in homogeneous teams were not always negative, and the majority of those taking part of the self-selection at IFS said they chose team by assignment - not social network as the prior literature said. Our conclusion reveals that there are several different factors to consider when having selfselection implemented in a traditional project environment. The main areas where we have found possible improvements are Team Choice, Team Diversity, Overlapping Assignments, Experienced Ownership, Management Influence and Performance.