Software Teams Research Articles

Correction to: Examining ownership models in software teams

Correction to: Examining ownership models in software teams

The Power of Words in Agile vs. Waterfall Development: Written Communication in Hybrid Software Teams

Software development is constantly evolving, adapting to emerging technologies and development paradigms while leveraging advancements in communication technologies and work modes. We conduct an exploratory case study in a large software organization to investigate how the development paradigm and the formality of communication channels affect written communication within hybrid teams. We perform statistical and content analysis of written conversations from 20 projects involving two software products that use industry adaptations of the Waterfall model and of Scrum, respectively. We found that in agile-developed projects, communication related to the execution-monitoring-control phase of the Project Management Life Cycle is more prevalent, and communication related to the initiation phase occurs more frequently in informal channels. For both project types, communication primarily pertains to the software construction phase of the Software Development Life Cycle. After annotating communication contents using speech acts, representatives are found to be prevalent in informal channels for agile-developed projects, directives are more prevalent in informal channels for waterfall-developed projects, and expressives are more frequent in informal channels for both project types. We provide empirical evidence that development paradigms and communication channel formality impact written communication, with agile-developed projects showing more collaborative interactions in informal channels compared to waterfall-developed projects.Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board.

TechMark: a framework for the development, engagement, and motivation of software teams in IT organizations based on gamification.

In today's fast-moving world of information technology (IT), software professionals are crucial for a company's success. However, they frequently experience low motivation as a result of competitive pressures, unclear incentives, and communication gaps. This underscores the critical need to handle these internal marketing challenges such as employee motivation, development, and engagement in IT organizations. Internal marketing practices aiming at attracting, engaging, and inspiring employees to use excellent services have become increasingly important. Internal marketing is attracting, engaging, and motivating employees as internal customers to utilize their quality services. Gamification has emerged as a significant trend over recent years. Despite the expanding use of gamification in the workplace, there is still a lack of focus on internal marketing tactics that incorporate gamification approaches. Thus, addressing the challenges related to employee motivation, development, and engagement is crucial. Therefore, as a principal contribution, this research presents a comprehensive framework designed to implement gamified solutions for software teams of IT organizations. This framework has been tailored to effectively address the challenges posed by internal marketing by optimizing motivation, development, and engagement. Moreover, the framework is applied to design and implement a gamified work portal (GWP) through a systematic process, including the design of low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes. Additionally, the GWP is validated through a quasi-experiment involving IT professionals from different IT organizations to authenticate the effectiveness of framework. Finally, the outclass results obtained by the gamification-based GWP highlight the effectiveness of the proposed gamification approach in enhancing development, motivation, and engagement while fostering ongoing knowledge of the employees.

It’s About Time! Understanding the Dynamic Team Process-Performance Relationship Using Micro- and Macroscale Time Lenses

Although team processes are conceptualized as temporal phenomena, our theoretical understanding of their unfolding over time is underdeveloped, particularly when “zooming in and out” into their dynamics using different temporal lenses. Team processes might unfold differently over extended project cycles (i.e., macroscale time lens) versus over brief events (microscale time lens). Our goal was to better understand temporal changes of three critical higher-order team processes (i.e., transition, action, and interpersonal processes) over both extended periods (i.e., longer project cycles) and brief time spans (i.e., recurring stand-up meetings). Focusing on two agile software teams, we indexed team processes across these two time spans using computer-aided text analysis (CATA) of meeting transcripts. Macroscale time span processes were captured across 10 sprints (30-week project cycle). Microscale time spans were captured with data from brief stand-up meetings (i.e., using 10 equidistant time intervals from 40 meetings). From a macroscale time lens (i.e., project cycle), an increase in action processes in the early project phase was associated with increases in performance. From a microscale time lens, changes in transition and interpersonal processes around mid-meeting phases were associated with differences in performance. Qualitative analyses of meeting midpoints revealed key differences in proactive planning and interpersonal processes. We discuss how our results provide novel insights for team process dynamics in relation to micro- and macroscale time spans.

Shared leadership in MNC agile software teams: The role of team leadership style and attitude to sport

This study investigates whether and how vertical leader transformational and transactional styles impact team members' perceptions of shared leadership. It also investigates the mediating role of a leader's attitude to sport on these relationships. Using a matched sample of 154 team leaders and 354 team members from agile teams in two MNCs located in Ireland and China, we found that both vertical transformational and transactional leadership were linked to team members' shared leadership behavior; however, the impact of transformational leadership was significantly greater. We also found that a vertical team leader's attitude to sports, and specifically the pleasure and participation attitude, positively mediated the relationship between transformational and transactional leadership and shared leadership behavior. This contrasted with the power and performance sports attitude, which mediated both transformational and transactional leadership styles, but for which the impact of transactional leadership on shared leadership became negative. We extend research on the antecedents of shared leadership and the important role that both a vertical leader's style and attitudes play within an agile software team. We discuss implications for theory and practice.

A rule-based decision model to support technical debt decisions: A multiple case study of web and mobile app startups

ContextSoftware startups are immature software organizations that focus on the development of a single software product or service. This organizational context accumulates a lot of technical debt to cope with constraints such as limited resources and product-market fit uncertainty. While some research has explored technical debt in startups, there is no study that investigates how software startups should make technical debt decisions throughout the startup evolution stages. ObjectiveThe objective of this study is to understand how technical debt decisions are made, and how such decisions should have been made in hindsight. MethodWe conducted a multiple embedded case study to investigate technical debt decisions in five web/mobile app startups. For each case, we interviewed the case founder and developer (a total of 17 participants across cases). In addition, we collected some public documents about the five startups. The data were analyzed using qualitative data analysis techniques. ResultsWe developed a rule-based decision model that summarizes the logic to effectively make technical debt decisions throughout the startup evolution stages. In addition, we evaluated the model by conducting follow-up interviews with three participants. ConclusionThe study provides a decision model that reflects actual practice, and is designed to help software teams in startups when making technical debt decisions throughout the startup evolution stages.

The role of psychological safety in promoting software quality in agile teams

Psychological safety continues to pique the interest of scholars in a variety of disciplines of study. Recent research indicates that psychological safety fosters knowledge sharing and norm clarity and complements agile values. Although software quality remains a concern in the software industry, academics have yet to investigate whether and how psychologically safe teams provide superior results. In this study, we explore how psychological safety influences agile teams’ quality-related behaviors aimed at enhancing software quality. To widen the empirical coverage and evaluate the results, we chose a two-phase mixed-methods research design with an exploratory qualitative phase (20 interviews) followed by a quantitative phase (survey study, N = 423). Our findings show that, when psychological safety is established in agile software teams, it induces enablers of a social nature that advance the teams’ ability to pursue software quality. For example, admitting mistakes and taking initiatives equally help teams learn and invest their learning in their future decisions related to software quality. Past mistakes become points of reference for avoiding them in the future. Individuals become more willing to take initiatives aimed at enhancing quality practices and mitigating software quality issues. We contribute to our endeavor to understand the circumstances that promote software quality. Psychological safety requires organizations, their management, agile teams, and individuals to maintain and propagate safety principles. Our results also suggest that technological tools and procedures can be utilized alongside social strategies to promote software quality.

Establishing Metrics to Encourage Broader Use of Atomic Requirements - A Call for Exchange and Experimentation

There are seemingly many advantages to being able to identify, document, test, and trace single or "atomic" requirements during system development and maintenance. Ongoing work with Agile development has focused on "user stories" that can capture individual features for implementation. However, it is still difficult to evaluate the quality of such requirements and teaching their creation is difficult. Based on a working definition of atomic requirement, this paper proposes a set of metrics for their evaluation. Ten metrics designed to measure atomic requirements are presented here: five used on individual requirements statements and five applied to a requirements document or set of requirement statements. Example metrics for individual requirements include Requirement Atomic Completeness and Requirement Atomic Verifiability. Requirement Traceability is a proposed metric for a set of atomic requirements (such as a traditional requirements specification document.) Further work is needed to make the suggested metrics more consistent and precise, including exploring the use of tools that may automate some of the measures. However, a first step is to refine the metrics themselves and ensure they adequately measure atomic requirement quality. Hence this note shares the proposed metrics to encourage discussion and to recommend experimentation. The author is applying the metrics in software engineering courses doing team software development. The goal is the eventual acceptance of a set of requirements metrics specifically designed to evaluate atomic requirements. Better metric definitions may lead to wider utilization of atomic requirements and improved requirements engineering in general.

Experience in the development and use of simulators for professional training of specialists in the electric power industry

Issues of development of simulators for training and testing of electrical engineers and students of electrical engineering specialties were considered. They are based on modern knowledge in the field of electricity. The main characteristics of simulators and requirements for their computer support are given. The developments implement a new method of practical training and testing of electrical engineers and can be used at all stages of electrical engineer training. The considered simulators are based on a combination of practical and theoretical knowledge of the electric power industry. The purpose of the developments is to activate and increase the efficiency of the educational process due to the introduction of new learning technologies. The technical capabilities of the software implement both individual and team work of students and electric power personnel. It was noted that in recent years, two professional simulators, implemented in the form of two laboratory workshops, have been developed and implemented in the educational process at the department of electrical energy transmission of National technical university “Kharkiv polytechnic institute”. The first helps students study the main provisions of the Normative Documentation in the power industry, the second – the rules and sequence of operational switching in electrical networks. In addition, experts determine the high efficiency of training systems based on precedent-analytical models. The exercise program according to the plan-do-check-act cycle is considered. Its basis is the well-known concept of continuous quality improvement “Plan-Do-Check-Act” (Deming's cycle). For the electric power industry, a plan-do-check-act cycle approach can consist of cyclical planning of activities, implementation of planned actions, verification of results obtained and correction of non-conformance to expectations. The precedent-scenario method of constructing a training system based on the software platform of the training system based on the plan-do-check-act scenario is presented in detail.

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.

Developer Thriving: Four Sociocognitive Factors That Create Resilient Productivity on Software Teams

Developer Thriving: Four Sociocognitive Factors That Create Resilient Productivity on Software Teams

Impact of team-composition and project-characteristics on Individual-knowledge growth and performance of onsite-offshore distributed software teams

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a conceptual model to measure the performance of onsite-offshore based global software development project (OGSDP) teams. The model is formulated through a review of literature and and a set of focus group studies, and it considers team composition, knowledge growth of the team members and project characteristics. Strategic policy analysis is then conducted using real-life case data from five global software development projects. The results highlight the significant influence of team composition and project characteristics on OGSDP team performance. Heterogeneities among team members may hinder knowledge-growth, thus leading to time and cost overruns as well as increase in latent errors. The model may help software managers to theoretically assess and optimise team composition at the beginning of a project, enabling them to anticipate team performance well in advance. In summary, this research offers practical insights into improving the performance of distributed software teams (which are smaller in size and duration), aiding software managers in achieving successful project outcomes.

Do code reviews lead to fewer code smells?

Context:The code review process is conducted by software teams with various motivations. Among other goals, code reviews act as a gatekeeper for software quality. Objective:In this study, we explore whether code reviews have an impact on one specific aspect of software quality, software maintainability. We further extend our investigation by analyzing whether code review process quality (as evidenced by the presence of code review process smells) influences software maintainability (as evidenced by the presence of code smells). Method:We investigate whether smells in the code review process are related to smells in the code that was reviewed by using correlation analysis. We augment our quantitative analysis with a focus group study to learn practitioners’ opinions. Results:Our investigations revealed that the level of code smells neither increases nor decreases in 8 out of 10 code reviews, regardless of the quality of the code review. Contrary to our own intuition and that of the practitioners in our focus groups, we found that code review process smells have little to no correlation with the level of code smells. We identified multiple potential reasons behind the counter-intuitive results based on our focus group data. Furthermore, practitioners still believe that code reviews are helpful in improving software maintainability. Conclusion:Our results imply that the community should update our goals for code review practices and reevaluate those practices to align them with more relevant and modern realities.

Factors Affecting the Success of Agile Software Teams

Thousands of teams are using agile software development methods, especially Scrum. Few of them are really “living” Scrum and therefore successful. This paper discusses the factors that led the Scrum team to the successful. A survey about the success factors in agile projects especially that related to the Scrum teams is presented. We proposed a new framework for the success factors of the Scrum team. According to a questionnaire is distributed to evaluate the Scrum team performance, we concluded that some of the success factors are strongly or moderated applied, but others are applied with a low degree. We calculated the Adherence degree for each success factor according to our evaluation to know its importance in the success of the software project.

TeReKG: A temporal collaborative knowledge graph framework for software team recommendation

Successful software development requires a cohesive team with the right mix of technical skills and the ability to collaborate effectively. However, forming a software team that can execute tasks with precision and efficiency requires a deep understanding of each member’s competence, experience, and cooperation history. Previously, automated software team selection has evaluated technical skills, cohesion, and cooperation history. However, the previous method had some limitations. Particularly, local features directly calculated from team members were subjective to the researchers’ views, and the method ignored the temporal aspect of open-source software development. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a knowledge-graph software team recommendation framework called TeReKG. This framework encapsulates temporal collaboration patterns and uses a temporal knowledge graph to encode software collaboration history, technical abilities, task dependencies, and project structure. TeReKG was against state-of-the-art team recommendation algorithms using three popular open-source software projects: Moodle, Apache, and Atlassian. The evaluation results show that TeReKG outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in both single-role and team recommendation tasks. These findings demonstrate that knowledge graph embedding can be effectively utilized in automated recommendation tasks in software engineering. Additionally, this highlights the potential for knowledge graphs to capture global information that can benefit various software development applications, including impact prediction of software repositories, code clone detection, and source code retrieval.

The impact of personality traits and cultural values on coordination effectiveness: A study of software development teams effectiveness

AbstractSoftware development projects depend on collaborative teams. In the past 50 years of research, various studies have explored the effect of software engineer's personality traits and cultural values on team performance. These studies have led to better understand these relationships; however, how the personality traits and cultural values influence the team effectiveness is still far away in the literature. This research aims to investigate the relationships between social and psychological complexities (including personality traits and cultural values), team coordination, team motivation, and team success (which comprises team effectiveness and team climate) to explore the impact of social and psychological issues on software team success. An online survey targeting software development professionals and unstructured interviews were followed for data collection. We received 112 responses from software developers working in different countries. Findings indicate that personality traits and cultural values, that is, consciousness, openness, harmony, and autonomy, have positive relationship with team coordination effectiveness, while other factors such as neuroticism, embeddedness, hierarchy, and mastery were found to be related negatively with it. These negative relationships can be mitigated by motivating team members appropriately. Based on our research findings, we conclude that the negative impact caused by different personality and cultural traits could be reduced by improving team coordination effectiveness using effective motivation.

Efficient Human Resource Allocation in Projects Using Centralized Data Envelopment Analysis

Human resource allocation is a critical component of project management, especially for projects that rely on the knowledge and expertise of skilled personnel. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a suitable method for this allocation since teams working for different tasks of a project can be considered as Decision Making Units (DMUs) that produce valuable outputs using different types and levels of personnel (inputs). We use Centralized DEA models for efficient allocation of human resources of the overall project among several teams. Using the software teams of a project undertaken in a large technological defense company as DMUs, we define appropriate outputs that measure effort, importance of work, and schedule performance. Factors relevant to the importance of work are aggregated using Rank Order Centroid weights according to expert evaluations. We differentiate between the permanent personnel of the company by their expertise level, and also subcontractors as different inputs. We define staffing policies with varying flexibilities that can be applied in different time periods, and suggest the transfer or removal of some personnel. Our results demonstrate that a centralized view on human resource allocation can bring noteworthy savings, especially in the long term when there is higher flexibility in staffing decisions.

What Happens to Psychological Safety When Going Remote?

Psychological safety is a precondition for learning and success in software teams. But what happens to psychological safety when work becomes remote? In this article, we explore how Norwegian software developers experienced remote work under the pandemic and after restrictions were waved and describe simple behaviors and attitudes related to psychological safety. We pay special attention to work arrangements in which team members alternate days in the office with days working remotely. Our key takeaway is that psychological safety is enabled by spontaneous interaction, which is easy to facilitate in the office and hard to facilitate remotely. Our findings lead us to recommend that team members align their work modes to increase chances for spontaneous interaction in the office while benefiting from the increased focus associated with working remotely.

Modeling of the process of resource allocation between digital software technologies

Resource distribution amongst digital software technology systems is a tough operation that demands high effectiveness and a significant amount of time, especially because it is a dynamic activity with basic factors that vary over time. In this article, we highlight three different situations in the technology sector. Firstly, the role of using the dynamic programming approach to construct a model that helps find the maximum profit value for digital software technology subsystems by choosing the optimal sequence of control distribution of resources between these subsystems. Secondly, constructing the optimal order for digital software technology project execution to find minimal waiting time using the compromise solution algorithm. Thirdly, the role of the optimal assignment method in finding a compromise solution is that it determines the "fairest" strategy for assignment in the sense that it minimizes the loss to the owner, who has the maximum loss in profit. The assignment methodology finds the optimal software teams for digital software technology system projects, where each software team is qualified for a digital software technology system project, taking other participants’ choices into account, to achieve the maximum profit. The dynamic programming methods considered here can be useful for planning and allocating resources between the enterprises of the agro-industrial complex.

INVESTIGAÇÃO QUANTITATIVA E QUALITATIVA DA ANÁLISE TRIDIMENSIONAL DA MARCHA EM PACIENTES COM MIELOPATIA CERVICAL

ABSTRACT Objective: This study aims to describe a kinematic gait assessment protocol and identify its main alterations in individuals with cervical spondylotic myelopathy (CSM) compared to healthy patients. Methods: In total, 14 patients diagnosed with CSM were enrolled and submitted to a three-dimensional gait analysis. The movement of patients was captured with infrared emission cameras that identified tracking markers placed on the lower limbs. Reference positions were used, and the patients walked along a rubberized walkway. The Gait Profile Score (GPS) and Movement Analysis Profile (MAP) were used to analyze variables. Results were subjected to a Student’s t-test at 95% confidence interval. The R Core Team (2016) software was used for statistical analysis, graphically comparing the study results with data from healthy patients. Results: When comparing the kinematic data bilaterally, no statistical differences were found. However, graphical analysis showed changes in the gait of patients with CSM compared to healthy individuals. There were differences in all movements, with a more significant discrepancy in hip and knee flexion and extension, dorsiflexion and plantar flexion, and internal and external hip rotation. Conclusion: We describe a protocol for gait kinematics assessment using GPS and MAP, and we presented the differences in gait kinematics in patients with CSM compared to healthy individuals. Level of Evidence II, Prospective study.