ABSTRACT In today's landscape of rapidly evolving software engineering, managers face a multitude of challenges and complex decision‐making scenarios. Within the Swedish Transport Administration (STA), software engineering managers take on dual roles as both strategists and traditional managers, increasing the complexity of their decision‐making environment. We investigate how management teams in this context can use and adopt agile practices for better decision‐making. The aim is to explore if agile software development team practices can be used for software engineering management teams, with the goal of identifying agile success factors that can be mapped to management success. We employ an industrial case study with a mixed‐method research approach, combining quantitative agile data using project tracking software, and qualitative data using structured interviews with the management teams. Unlike previous research that has primarily examined agile adoption within software development teams or emphasized the manager's supportive role, this work investigates management teams themselves as adopters of agile practices and metrics. To our knowledge, this is the first study to develop a mapping model that systematically connects Scrum‐based practices, roles, and metrics to the context of software engineering management teams. Our study showed that Scrum‐based agile practices, such as stand‐ups and retrospectives, can be adapted to software engineering management teams, and that certain agile software development metrics can be transformed into a managerial setting using our proposed model.
Salin et al. (2026) studied this question.