Agile human resources management

Abstract

The significant transformations in society characterize the intensive environment and the fast changing situations in which all organizations operate and are subject, regardless of their size. The demands of business competitiveness make human capital management therefore a challenge. This is mainly accentuated in technology companies, where software development is exclusively focused on the ability to create new knowledge, the main strategic resource of organizational action. Research and studies in this area have demonstrated that software engineering methodologies as they evolve and consider a greater number of human factors as an integral part of the software development process tend to have a greater degree of success in the real world. Among the methodologies that have been most successful in the use of human factors and which have been gaining popularity in recent years we find the methodologies of agile software development. This set of methodologies is based on a perspective in which software development is performed in an iterative and incremental way and where requirements and functionalities evolve through collaboration between self-managed and multifunctional teams. These environments of intense collaboration aim to maximize the unique characteristics of each individual and each team and thus contribute to the increase of organizational knowledge and individual skills. And this is where HRM has an important role to play. It is therefore important to understand how human resources management should respond to the new challenges posed by the introduction of these new methodologies. Thus, this research aims to study how the current human resources management function is perceived by agile software development teams with regard to attracting, developing and retaining people.