Abstract
AbstractHigh‐quality work is said to depend on team abilities. However, teams working in large‐scale projects often do not have all expertise to complete their tasks, which are also highly interdependent. Therefore, teams need to rely on coordination with other teams, experts, and supporting roles. In this paper, we explore teams' coordination needs and evaluate the impact of the satisfaction of these needs on team performance. We conducted an embedded multicase study with nine teams in two projects in two companies. We collected qualitative data through nine focus groups and 19 interviews and quantitative data using a questionnaire with 49 members from the studied teams. Our results suggest that project‐, team‐, and task‐related characteristics impact teams' coordination needs. Even in the same project, teams may have different expertise and work coordination needs. We found that the satisfaction of these needs seems to influence teams' performance, although our results are inconclusive and yield a closer look in future research. On the basis of our findings, we recommend the companies to cultivate a networking culture and support teams external coordination with other teams and experts, paying attention to their needs, for example, driven by a lack of experience or increased work complexity.
Highlights
In recent years, as software-intensive systems have grown in size and complexity, large-scale software development projects have become more and more common
To identify effective coordination practices, (1) we focus on the tasks software development teams receive, (2) how tasks affect teams' needs for coordination, and (3) what is coordinated by software development teams with other teams, experts, and support roles in large-scale software development projects
We report on the teams' coordination needs for expertise and work coordination
Summary
As software-intensive systems have grown in size and complexity, large-scale software development projects have become more and more common. Many companies struggle to achieve the desired performance because of the complexity,[1,2] the size of developed software systems,[3] the number of people involved,[4] and distribution of teams in multiple sites.[5,6]. Large-scale projects have large complex codebases, many teams working on the same codebase at the same time, and the need for many experts to coordinate tasks that have complex dependencies between them. Becoming an expert in such large complex systems takes years,[8] which is why large-scale projects often have too few experts available to
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