Purpose – This thesis is to identifying key success factors for autonomous agile teams at the small-scale. Furthermore the purpose leads to an improvement of their working process.

Method – This study is based on a comparative case study of a company with offices located in Jönköping and Ängelholm. The data is gathered by semi-structured qualitative interviews and by a survey with qualitative and quantitative answers.

Findings – The results from RQ1 shows that there exists a difference between established and non-established autonomous agile teams in order to achieve success for projects. ​The findings from RQ2 present six themes that each represent key success factors in an autonomous agile team-based IT project at the small scale. The themes are ​Customer Oriented, Architecture, Individual Development, Team Setup, Entirety and Privilege. The findings from RQ3 resulted in six different elements (​Freedom and Flexibility, Trust and Responsibility, Clear directions, Environment, The work gives value ​ and ​Shared knowledge) ​ that make an individual team member satisfied in an autonomous agile team.

Limitations – A fair limitation of this study is too few people to answered the survey. More respondents would have increased the trustworthiness of the results.

Keywords – Autonomy, Self-organizing, Success factor, Agile development, Small-scale, Job satisfaction