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 <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">is there a recurrent organisational structure pattern in agile software engineering teams?</i> and if so <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">what does that pattern imply, in terms of software architecture quality?</i> 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.