Abstract

Agile teams can face various risks to their software project's resources and schedule. Yet, the increasingly specialized team roles in a software project may emphasize different explanations of these risks. Against this backdrop, we report a case study of how an agile team can understand and manage different explanations of their project risks. We used the causal mapping technique to understand how a team's six different roles explain their software project risks and assessed these maps' usefulness with the team. Our study shows that software project risks have mutual implications and that causal mapping is useful for revealing and juxtaposing role-specific explanations of software project risks in agile teams. These causal explanations of project risks exhibit 1) a mechanistic ontology of causality as an actual process that connects inputs to outputs, 2) an indwelling trajectory where causality occurs within an undifferentiated entity – the project, and 3) a human-centered autonomy of causal effects moving from people to technology. We discuss how these findings suggest researchers and practitioners should attend to causal explanations of software project risks.

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