How an organisation sustains agility over time, and the actions it takes when encountering challenges to its agility, are not well established. This study explores how an organisation sustained its agility beyond the initial adoption stage when its agility was founded on the values, principles, and practices of agile software development. A qualitative case study of the Retail organisation within a company was carried out. The Retail organisation had sustained agility for six years. Nine main challenges are: disparate levels of maturity, resistance to change, competing priorities, lack of team empowerment, dependencies between teams, onboarding people to the agile way of working, lack of role clarity, staff turnover, and incompatible funding model. Based on the solutions to these challenges, eight general actions applied to sustain agility are: a clear reason for implementing agile principles, continuously raising agile awareness, continuously adjusting the business operating model, embedding specialist agile roles, changing the funding model, making work visible, supporting agile teamwork, and monitor, measure, feedback, and act. The contributions of this article are practical. The challenges, detailed solutions, and general actions identified could be helpful for organisations that need to sustain agility in contexts similar to the case organisation. The findings should enable synthesis with future case studies and potential theory-building.

Abstract Teamwork is crucial in software development, particularly in agile development teams which are cross-functional and where team members work intensively together to develop a cohesive software solution. Effective teamwork is not easy; prior studies indicate challenges with communication, learning, prioritization, and leadership. Nevertheless, there is much advice available for teams, from agile methods, practitioner literature, and general studies on teamwork to a growing body of empirical studies on teamwork in the specific context of agile software development. This article presents the agile teamwork effectiveness model (ATEM) for colocated agile development teams. The model is based on evidence from focus groups, case studies, and multi-vocal literature and is a revision of a general team effectiveness model. Our model of agile teamwork effectiveness is composed of shared leadership, team orientation, redundancy, adaptability, and peer feedback. Coordinating mechanisms are needed to facilitate these components. The coordinating mechanisms are shared mental models, communication, and mutual trust. We critically examine the model and discuss extensions for very small, multi-team, distributed, and safety-critical development contexts. The model is intended for researchers, team members, coaches, and leaders in the agile community.

Although a stable team is deemed optimal for agile project success, new team members need to join ongoing agile projects. Newcomers must rapidly assimilate into the organisational and project environment while learning how to contribute effectively to the project and integrate into the team without seriously interrupting project progress. This paper addresses how newcomers integrate into an established agile project team and the challenges newcomers and the team face during this process. This paper is a single case study of a co-located agile project team in a large IT department who regularly onboard inexperienced newcomers. We found a mixture of traditional onboarding practices and specific agile practices contribute to the onboarding process. Onboarding challenges include empowerment and mindset change, accommodating part-timers, conveying agile principles, and adjusting to changes in team composition.