Software Development Team Performance Research Articles

The Impact of Teamwork Quality (TWQ) on Agile Software Development Team Performance

Purpose: The study examined the extent to which teamwork quality (TWQ) impacts team performance in the Agile software development space in the U.S. and how the TWQ factors (Communication, coordination of expertise, cohesion, trust, mutual support & value sharing) are ranked in terms of importance to team performance Materials and Methods: The study used correlation and regression analysis to determine the degree of the relationship and the effect of the extended TWQ factors on Agile software team performance. Additionally, the study assessed the relative importance of the TWQ factors to team performance. Participants in the study included IT workers from the software development team in U.S. companies with in-house teams using the Agile methodology. Data was collected using an online survey through survey monkey. The data was presented through descriptive statistics and analyzed using regression analysis. Findings: The study found all the extended TWQ factors were strongly correlated to the team performance. The analysis showed that a statistically significance predictive relationship exists between the extended TWQ factors and Agile software development team performance. However, only mutual support and value sharing contributed statistically significantly to the model. Among these factors, mutual support was ranked as the most important TWQ factor in relation to team performance, while trust was ranked as the least. Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: This empirical study tested and extended the TWQ model on team performance in the Agile software development space in the U.S. for software development teams and how these TWQ factors are ranked in terms of importance to team performance. The findings provide insight to project teams and team leaders, product owners, scrum masters, and project managers about the TWQ model from the perspective of agile software development teams. The findings also address the critical TWQ factors that are needed for building effective and efficient Agile software development teams.

Trust evaluation in virtual software development teams using BERT-based language models

Nowadays, people from different geographical areas can be closely related thanks to advances in information and communication technologies. This has a greater impact in software development organizations where their members form virtual work teams. In these new co-located work scenarios, the construction of interpersonal trust is more complex and its impact is very relevant in the performance of software development teams. This paper presents the results of the performanceevaluation of four pre-trained language models based on BERT applied to trust analysis tasks. For this work, a small dataset of 1453 comments obtained from software projects stored on Github was created. The evaluated language models achieved moderately good values, in the order of 0.84 for the F1-score metric, which augurs that with further research they could be significantly improved.

An Empirical Study to Investigate the Effect of Transactive Memory System on Software Development Team Performance

Software development often involves teams of developers interacting with each other to develop a software product or service. Given that individuals in the same team may have varying expertise and knowledge, it is believed that proper management of Transactive Memory System (TMS) or group knowledge within a team is more likely to ensure optimum team performance. In this study, we test this hypothesis by using an experiment in which we compare the performance of different teams with different TMS in solving the same software related problems. Our results indicate it is under certain conditions, that teams with higher TMS will usually achieve better performance than teams with lower TMS.

A Configural Approach to Coordinating Expertise in Software Development Teams

Despite the recognition of how important expertise coordination is to the performance of software development teams, understanding of how expertise is coordinated in practice is limited. We adopt a configural approach to develop a theoretical model of ex

Individual Creativity and Team Climate in Software Development Projects: The Mediating Role of Team Decision Processes

This study investigates how individual creativity is related to the quality of team decision processes and team climate, and the mediating role of team decision processes between individual creativity and team climate. A multi‐level theoretical model was proposed and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS‐SEM) was conducted on a sample of 139 software development projects. The results suggest that: (i) individual creativity improves the quality of team decision processes, (ii) team decision processes are positively associated with four dimensions of team climate (organizational support, innovation orientation, goal orientation and informal structure), and (iii) team decision processes partially mediate between individual creativity and team climate. In particular, the obtained results stress the role of individual creativity in the formation and evolution of a positive climate by means of team decision processes. The study implies that managers should recognize the value of creative individuals as the basic source of competitive advantage and success. It further discusses the managerial implications of the findings as well as limitations and constructive new directions for future studies to improve software development team performance.

Diversity in team composition, relationship conflict and team leader support on globally distributed virtual software development team performance

Purpose– This study aims to investigate whether diversity in team composition leads to relationship conflict, and, consequently, relationship conflict leads to team performance, and whether team leader support moderates the negative effects of relationship conflict on team performance.Design/methodology/approach– For the study, 216 team members working in globally distributed virtual software development projects responded. To examine the hypothesized relationships, structural equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation was performed.Findings– It was found that diversity in team composition leads to relationship conflict, relationship conflict leads to team performance and team leader support moderates the latter relationship.Practical implications– The findings suggest the role of team leaders in reducing the harmful effect of relationship conflict on team performance. The findings imply the need of providing training to team leaders to create cohesive teams that deliver on project goals.Originality/value– Empirical studies on globally distributed virtual teams could provide new insights into challenges and issues associated with team composition, relationship conflict and team leader support in achieving higher levels of team performance.

Alignment between social and technical capability in software development teams

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of alignment at the team level. Because teams are important in software development projects, the paper focuses on studying the influence of alignment between the social and technical capabilities on software development team performance. Drawing on socio‐technical theory and software product development literature, the paper aims to identify social and technical capabilities for software development teams.Design/methodology/approachEmpirical data from 192 software development teams were analyzed. The profile deviation approach was used to calculate alignment.FindingsThe findings suggest that misalignment between capabilities negatively impacts product and process performance.Research limitations/implicationsThe study provides an intellectually coherent view in studying software development team performance. The study contributes to the literature by assessing alignment needs at the team level.Practical implicationsThe study provides a holistic view for studying team capabilities and guides software development team leaders and managers to consider both the social and technical aspects in assessing team performance.Originality/valueAlignment or misalignment is mostly studied in the literature from a macro level/organizational perspective. There exists a gap in the literature for studying alignment at more granular levels such as between various business sub‐units or within teams. The study addresses the gap by studying alignment within teams.

Soft factors affecting the performance of software development teams

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to classify the factors affecting the performance of software development teams and stress the soft (non‐technical) factors affecting the performance of software development teams.

Editorial

Editorial

Effects of intra‐group conflict on packaged software development team performance

Abstract. Data from 40 packaged software development teams are used to test a path model that relates three antecedents, the presence of intragroup conflict and the level of conflict management to software development team performance. Findings indicate that a combination of the team's characteristics, team member characteristics and existing levels of intragroup conflict accounts for nearly one‐half of the variance between the best and worst‐performing teams. Furthermore, the level of conflict management moderates the relationship between existing levels of intragroup conflict and performance. These results highlight both the complexity of the social processes of packaged software development and the value of this perspective for gaining insight on software development performance.

Enabling Software Development Team Performance During Requirements Definition: A Behavioral Versus Technical Approach

As software development projects continue to be over budget and behind schedule, researchers continue to look for ways to improve the likelihood of project success. In this research we juxtapose two different views of what influences software development team performance during the requirements development phase. In an examination of 66 teams from 15 companies we found that team skill, managerial involvement, and little variance in team experience enable more effective team processes than do software development tools and methods. Further, we found that development teams exhibit both positive and negative boundary-spanning behaviors. Team members promote and champion their projects to the outside environment, which is considered valuable by project stakeholders. They also, however, guard themselves from their environments; keeping important information a secret from stakeholders negatively predicts performance.

Software development: Processes and performance

This paper presents data that describe the effects on software development performance due to both the production methods of software development and the social processes of how software developers work together. Data from 40 software development teams at one site that produces commercial software are used to assess the effects of production methods and social processes on both software product quality and team performance. Findings indicate that production methods, such as the use of software methodologies and automated development tools, provide no explanation for the variance in either software product quality or team performance. Social processes, such as the level of informal coordination and communication, the ability to resolve intragroup conflicts, and the degree of supportiveness among the team members, can account for 25 percent of the variations in software product quality. These findings suggest two paradoxes for practice: (1) that teams of software developers are brought together to create variability and production methods are used to reduce variability, and (2) that team-level social processes may be a better predictor of software development team performance than are production methods. These findings also suggest that factors such as other social actions or individual-level differences must account for the large and unexplained variations in team performance.