Elsevier

Journal of Systems and Software

Volume 122, December 2016, Pages 274-286
Journal of Systems and Software

Teamwork quality and project success in software development: A survey of agile development teams

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2016.09.028Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • We studied the effect of teamwork quality on project success in agile software teams.

  • We ran a survey with responses from 477 respondents from 71 teams in 26 companies.

  • Teamwork quality is perceived to have a small to large effect on team performance, depending of the rater.

  • Teamwork quality is perceived to have a large effect on personal success.

  • Teamwork quality and its effects are not greater in agile than in traditional teams.

Abstract

Small, self-directed teams are central in agile development. This article investigates the effect of teamwork quality on team performance, learning and work satisfaction in agile software teams, and whether this effect differs from that of traditional software teams. A survey was administered to 477 respondents from 71 agile software teams in 26 companies and analyzed using structural equation modeling. A positive effect of teamwork quality on team performance was found when team members and team leaders rated team performance. In contrast, a negligible effect was found when product owners rated team performance. The effect of teamwork quality on team members´ learning and work satisfaction was strongly positive, but was only rated by the team members. Despite claims of the importance of teamwork in agile teams, this study did not find teamwork quality to be higher than in a similar survey on traditional teams. The effect of teamwork quality on team performance was only marginally greater for the agile teams than for the traditional teams.

Keywords

Agile development
Project management
Team performance
Teamwork quality
Work Satisfaction
Learning

Cited by (0)

Yngve Lindsjørn received his MSc degree in computer science from the University of Oslo in 1987. He worked 10 years as a researcher at Norsk Regnesentral from 1987 to 1997. He has 13 years of industry experience as project manager and as a manager (CEO) of a software company within the IT industry. From 2009 to 2014 he was project manager for a research project investigating the effect of teamwork within and across software development teams. From 2010 he has worked at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. His research interests include software development methods and teamwork factors influencing software project success.

Dag I.K. Sjøberg received the MSc degree in computer science from the University of Oslo in 1987 and the PhD degree in computing science from the University of Glasgow in 1993. He has five years of industry experience as a developer and group leader. In 2001, he formed the Software Engineering Department at Simula Research Laboratory and was its leader until 2008, when it was number 1 in a ranking by the Journal of Systems and Software. Since 1999 he has been a full professor of software engineering at the University of Oslo. Sjøberg was an associate editor of Empirical Software Engineering from 2002 to 2009 and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering from 2010 to 2014. His main research interests are the software life cycle, including agile and lean development processes, skill assessment, and empirical research methods in software engineering. Sjøberg is a member of IEEE and ACM.

Torgeir Dingsøyr focuses on software process improvement and knowledge management as chief scientist at the SINTEF research foundation. In particular, he has studied agile software development through a number of case studies, co-authored the systematic review of empirical studies, co-edited the book Agile Software Development: Current Research and Future Directions, and co-edited the special issue on Agile Methods in the Journal of Systems and Software. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Knowledge Management in Medium-Sized Software Consulting Companies at the Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he is an adjunct professor.

Gunnar R. Bergersen received the MSc degree in computer science (2001) and the PhD degree in software engineering (2015) from the University of Oslo. He has worked as a software developer, project leader, and manager for over 15 years and is currently the CEO of Technebies, a startup based on his work at Simula Research Laboratory. Bergersen is employed part time at the University of Oslo, first as a researcher since 2011 and then as an associate professor since 2016. His research interests concern software development, particularly the acquisition and measurement of programming skills.

Tore Dybå received the MSc degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1986, and the Dr. Ing. degree in computer and information science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2001. He has eight years of industry experience from Norway and Saudi Arabia. He is a chief scientist and research manager at SINTEF ICT and a professor at the University of Oslo. For the period 2001–2012, he was ranked as the top scholar worldwide in agile software development by the Journal of Systems and Software. He was on the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering from 2007 to 2013. Since 2011 he has been editor of the Voice of Evidence column in IEEE Software, and since 2013 he has been on the editorial board of Information and Software Technology. His research interests include evidence-based software engineering, software process improvement, and agile software development.