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LEADERSHIP ROLE IN SOFTWARE PROJECTS

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 LEADERSHIP ROLE IN SOFTWARE PROJECTS
Assignment 2: Leadership
Advanced Software Project Management – PA2513

Pavan Sutha Varma Indukuri

930608-4931
pain15@student.bth.se
Department of Computer Science
Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (BTH)
Karlskrona, Sweden.

Abstract— Leadership plays an important role in the
performance of the team, it impacts productivity. The leader
influences the followers’ goals in a group towards the
achievement of organizational goals. This paper mainly focuses
on the role of the leader in a self-organizing agile team based on
Scrum environment in a software developing project. The leader
is responsible for building an effective team for a project and also
motivating the individuals with disabilities. A leader motivates
the individuals by encouraging team coordination, setting goals
for the team, and emphasize team’s ability to achieve those goals.
The Leader is said to be successful if he is capable of opting
situationally appropriate leadership styles or behavior.
Keywords—leadership styles, agile team, scrum, behavior,
cohesive.
I. INTRODUCTION
An effective software development organization divides the
individuals into teams and assigns a particular person among
them as a leader. The leader is responsible for the performance
of the team. He monitors all the team members closely in order
to accomplish the task given to the team which would lead to
achieving organizational goals. So the project success lies in
the capability of the leader.
Leadership is known as “the process of influencing the
activities of an organized group in its efforts towards goal
setting and goal achievement”[1].Leaders perceive future
outcomes to proactively react to present situations while in
contrast managers aim for stability and try to solve the problem
by executing existing ways [2].
Leadership styles can be broadly divided into two
categories, Transformational leadership, and Transactional
leadership. Transactional leader’s relationship with the team
members is a process of exchange of rewards for performance.
They offer rewards or threaten to punish to the team members
to accomplish their given task. Transformational leaders
motivate and inspire individuals to complete various tasks and
somewhat reduces employees’ stress. Though transformational
leadership seems to be effective than transactional leadership,
often a combination of both these styles is considered for the
success of the project.[3][4]
Leader’s behavior can be relationship-oriented or task-
oriented based on the situation. Relation-oriented leaders aim
to accomplish tasks by developing good relationships with
followers while task-oriented leaders concentrate only at the
completion of the given task [5].
Trait, style and contingency approach are the prominent
qualities of leadership. Trait approach helps in distinguishing a
leader from a team, style approach focuses on behavior which
makes the leaders successful and contingency approach
highlights the situational behavior in a leader [1].
Situational leadership depends on willingness, motivation
and readiness of individuals in doing specific tasks. Leadership
styles are divided into four categories telling, selling,
participating and delegating based on willingness and ability of
the followers [6].
GIVEN TASK:
As a project manager in a software development organization,
form a team of 8 members from the existing developers or
employ new people to develop a brand new innovative version
of the printer software. Available developers are:
 5 recently employed
 2 highly experienced developers
 4 developers with relevant experience
 4 developers with experience from different projects
The rest of the paper is organized in the following way:
Section II focuses on team building. Team cooperation is
briefly discussed in Section III. Section IV elevates the role of
leadership in team motivation. Section V deals with teamwork.
This is followed by conclusion in Section VI.
II. TEAM BUILDING
The team is ‘‘a small number of people with
complementary skills who are committed to a common
purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they
hold themselves mutually accountable” [7].
Selection of team members is not simply opting all the
intelligent people because it won’t possess best results. Instead
team must be cohesive in nature comprising people of all ages,
genders, different experience levels. To form a balanced team,
redundant characteristics in the team must be reduced so the
leader must assemble people with diverse strengths required for
developing a software [8].
Selection of candidates for an agile team should be based on
readiness of the people who are willing to perform specific
tasks, so that this would make the candidate work beyond
expectations in that particular task and reduce their weakness
in other fields [9].
While assembling a team in a software development project,
leader must consider the following skills in the team members
which are required for achieving the goals:
 Technical skills: Leader must perceive the technical
issues in the project development and choose people
with those skills. Candidates with these skills would
assist the team to solve the technical problems which
would arise during the development process.
 Decision-making skills: Members with problem-
solving skills would be useful to suggest an efficient
solution when the team is facing any bottleneck
during the process. These skills can be improved by
training.
 Interpersonal skills: They refer to born qualities of a
person. These skills are required to express his ideas
by communicating with the team members and would
result in a better teamwork coordination. Training
doesn’t help in improving these skills.
 Product Development skills: These skills must be
carefully observed by the leader and later train them
to excel their skills which would allow the members
to work creatively and in an innovative manner [9].
Experiences along with knowledge and skills would
increase the group capability as their preceding performance
and enhance their existing skills[10]. Highly experienced
people are always given higher priority over others as they
would have come across various projects and are aware of
pitfalls and benefits in implementing a particular idea. Even
though they are available part time, it is always advantageous
to have highly experienced people in developing software
projects as their valuable suggestions would reflect in the team
performance to a higher extent.
Introducing students in software development projects
exhibits various challenges[11].While developing an
innovative software, selecting at least one newly employed
undergraduate student in the team would be fruitful. Latest
generation candidate ideas would be fresh and innovative to
compete with the existing software. At times, they would play
a vital role for the success of the software.
Experienced candidates with greater coordination and
teamwork would increase group effectiveness [10].Among the
four developers with relevant experience, three developers
have worked together before. These three developers would
have better coordination than others as they have worked
together previously. Their presence in the group would
minimize the task of team coordination to some extent.
Previous experiences of the candidates also have an
impact on the effectiveness of software development projects
[10]. Developers from different projects would increase
cohesive nature in the group and their experiences in their
respective projects would be helpful for the team to develop an
innovative software. Selecting developers whose projects are
embedding software or other projects which are relevant to
printer software would be beneficial to the team.
According to my view one of the best possible team for
developing brand new innovative printer software would be:
 1 recently employed
 2 highly experienced developers
 3 developers with relevant experience who have
worked together before
 2 developers with experience from different projects
III. TEAM COOPERATION
After forming a team, it is the responsibility of a leader to
emphasize team coordination and cooperation between them.
The leader may share his vision to the team members in order
to understand the task of the team.
Team cooperation is necessary for the members to
communicate with each other and share their visions towards
the achievement of organizational goals. It involves an
exchange of information among the team members, leader and
the organization [9]. Team cooperation would lead to better
understanding of the task and would allow the team members
to work together without any conflicts towards fulfilling the
organizational goals.
IV. TEAM MOTIVATION
Leaders must motivate the followers with disabilities by
explaining the importance of the work assigned to the
individual which is related to organizational goals [12]. A
leader must also encourage follower to develop his own skill
and at times training must be taken to describe the task in a
detailed way.
Leadership style towards the team members with
disabilities should be telling or selling based on the situation to
scrutinize the follower actions and train him to match the team
standards [6].
Transformational leaders motivate and encourage team
members’ skills to complete the given task. Candidates with
intrinsic motivation would be helpful for innovative projects as
they work beyond expectation. Intrinsic motivation refers to
the motivational state where people work with interest rather
than for rewards. Team members with high intrinsic motivation
would search for creative solutions to a specific problem and
work with all their efforts for achieving the goals. Hence,
intrinsic motivation increases the creativity of the individuals
[13].
 V. TEAMWORK
Software project success relies on team performance which
is based on the efficiency of the team coordination. A
successful working team is often influenced by leaders’
motivation towards achieving higher productivity and
followers’ satisfaction.
In an agile team, a self-organized team, work is coordinated
by the team members itself. A self-organized team “is
recognized as a self-regulated, semi-autonomous small group
of employees whose members determine, plan and manage
their day-to-day activities and duties”[14]. Leadership style in
an agile team would be participating, as the followers and the
leader work towards achieving the goals or accomplishing the
given task.
Scrum is a process of planning software projects in small-
scale self-organized teams. This process consists of series of
phases known as sprints, which consists of a set of tasks [7].
Backlogs play a vital role in scrum development process where
two lists are maintained which comprises of fulfilled
requirements and the necessary requirements for the customers.
Everyday scrum meetings are organized where the previous
day tasks are discussed which would increase the productivity
of the software development team. Scrum improves the ability
of the team to handle complex problems[15].
In agile teams, project success lies in the team skills rather
than the leader abilities. So, shared leadership in the team
increases the group effectiveness by empowering the team
members to share responsibilities of the leader.[7]
VI. CONCLUSION
The role of the leader in various stages of a software
development project are briefly discussed in the above
sections. The leader plays a key role in software development
projects where he is responsible for the team performance.
Leadership style based on the situation and intrinsic motivation
of the transformational leader enhances the creativity of the
followers and make them work beyond expectation. However,
in agile teams leadership is often shared among the team
members, so the task completion is based on the team skills
rather than only the leaders’ abilities itself. Scrum process
allows the team members to coordinate with each other and
encourages them to share their visions towards goal
achievement.
The high readiness of the followers and cohesive nature of
the agile team make it a successful approach in software
development projects. Moreover, the leader is responsible for
achieving organizational goals but in agile teams leader
responsibility is shared by all the team members for an efficient
output. Therefore, an agile approach must be encouraged for
the upcoming projects due to its ability to solve complex
problems effectively.
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