Impediment Management of Agile Software Development Teams

Context: Many agile software development teams deal with blockers that prevent them from working efficiently and achieving their (sprint) goals. There is few guidance concerning impediment management, only that you have to collect impediments and specify them in the impediments backlog. Therefore, many teams developed individual solutions to approach impediments. Objective: This paper should help to understand how agile teams identify, document and solve impediments in practice. Method: Seven semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with agile practitioners from German companies. Results: An overview of different ways teams might handle their impediments is provided. Based on the results, an initial model of the impediment management process is proposed. Conclusion: The results of this study support practitioners when defining or improving the way they deal with impediments.