The Manifestation of Self-regulation, Co-regulation and Socially Shared Regulation in Software Development Teams

In the industry of software development, teams are the basic unit of work and it is argued by most development methods that teams should self-manage. Therefore, the concept of regulation becomes essential. The concepts of regulation of the educational field of research have been applied in this study, investigating three software development teams using the Scrum method. The teamwork of the teams was observed by means of video recordings which were coded afterwards, focusing on the way the different types of regulation (self-regulation, co-regulation & socially shared regulation) and phases of regulation (planning, monitoring, evaluating) manifested. Due to time constraints and in order to reduce the scope of this study, it was randomly chosen to focus on investigating only regulation activities that occurred during the planning phase of regulation. Different patterns were observed for the way in which the different types and phases of regulation manifested in the different teams. The types of regulation always occurred together with the corresponding perspectives (I-perspective, you-perspective & we-perspective) for the different types of regulation. Moreover, the Scrum masters of the teams protruded in so far as they were the team members who overall showed most regulation activities in their team.