Simone Spiegler, Christoph Heinecke and Stefan Wagner have published an open-access article at the Empirical Software Engineering journal on the results of a collaboration of Robert Bosch GmbH and the Empirical Software Engineering group. They conduced a large-scale qualitative study on leadership in agile teams. The agile way of working has gained significance in software development and beyond. It comes with the assumption that teams are self-organising. Yet, it has been not clear what that means in detail.
We observed that there is a change in leadership over time. Often a role such as a Scrum Master still plays several leadership roles that are then transfered over time to team members. In this study we identified nine such leadership roles and what factors help in the role transfer process.
We hope that these results help to better understand leadership in agile teams in gernal but also support practitioners in making their teams more effective.