Psychological Safety and Norm Clarity in Software Engineering Teams

In the software engineering industry today, companies primarily conduct their work in teams. To increase organizational productivity, it is thus crucial to know the factors that affect team effectiveness. Two team-related concepts that have gained prominence lately are psychological safety and team norms. Still, few studies exist that explore these in a software engineering context. Therefore, with the aim of extending the knowledge of these concepts, we examined if psychological safety and team norm clarity associate positively with software developers' self-assessed team performance and job satisfaction, two important elements of effectiveness. We collected industry survey data from practitioners (N = 217) in 38 development teams working for five different organizations. The result of multiple linear regression analyses indicates that both psychological safety and team norm clarity predict team members' self-assessed performance and job satisfaction. The findings also suggest that clarity of norms is a stronger (30\% and 71\% stronger, respectively) predictor than psychological safety. This research highlights the need to examine, in more detail, the relationship between social norms and software development. The findings of this study could serve as an empirical baseline for such, future work.Comment: Submitted to CHASE'201

Role clarity deficiencies can wreck agile teams

Background One of the twelve agile principles is to build projects around motivated individuals and trust them to get the job done. Such agile teams must self-organize, but this involves conflict, making self-organization difficult. One area of difficulty is agreeing on everybody’s role. Background What dynamics arise in a self-organizing team from the negotiation of everybody’s role? Method We conceptualize observations from five agile teams (work observations, interviews) by Charmazian Grounded Theory Methodology. Results We define role as something transient and implicit, not fixed and named. The roles are characterized by the responsibilities and expectations of each team member. Every team member must understand and accept their own roles (Local role clarity) and everbody else’s roles (Team-wide role clarity). Role clarity allows a team to work smoothly and effectively and to develop its members’ skills fast. Lack of role clarity creates friction that not only hampers the day-to-day work, but also appears to lead to high employee turnover. Agile coaches are critical to create and maintain role clarity. Conclusions Agile teams should pay close attention to the levels of Local role clarity of each member and Team-wide role clarity overall, because role clarity deficits are highly detrimental

Team performance and large scale agile software development

Software development is a team work and largely dependent on open social interaction and continuous learning of individuals. Drawing on well established theoretical concepts proposed by social psychology and organizational science disciplines, we develop a theoretical framework proposing that team climate has a significant influence on team learning and ultimately affects team performance. Our study consists of two goals. First to understand the preconditions of team learning and second to investigate the relationship between team learning, psychological safety, and team performance in large scale agile software development projects. We plan to conduct a survey with software professionals in Sweden from three companies partners in pur large-scale agile research project.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, conference, ESEM, Register Repor

How the Team Norm of Information Exchange and Team Information Processing Affects Team Performance in Software Development Projects?

This study examines how the team norm of information exchange and team information processing affects team performance. Data were collected from 354 project teams from software development companies in Thailand. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was conducted to test the proposed hypotheses. The results of the study revealed that team norms of information exchange (TNM) has a significant relationship with team information processing (PRO). Team information processing positively influences team performance (TPM). Software development organisations could adopt such norms and this team process to improve software development projects performance and recognise team processes, which is essential for long-term sustainability and competitiveness

Innovation in services: corporate culture and investment banking

The article discusses service innovation in the investment banking industry. Service industry innovations differ from innovations in industries that produce physical products because they rarely have intellectual property and patent protections. However, investment banking services are typically a series of interrelated businesses such as consulting, wealth management and accounting, and innovations require a business wide coordinated approach. The authors argue that a strong corporate culture can support rather than hinder innovation. The creation of such a culture requires strong leadership and an emphasis on innovation in hiring and promotions

Behavioral Software Engineering - Organizational Change Refocused

Background The development of software is not only a technical endeavor; it is significantly affected by the behaviors of the people involved. Since social scientists have been studying humans for over a century, it is likely that insights they have developed could be used to increase software development effectiveness. There are, nevertheless, indications that software engineering researchers seldom use theories developed and proven within the social sciences. Overall, software engineering research that emphasizes human aspects is still limited compared to studies with technology or process focus.Objective Given the importance of human aspects in software development, we argue that knowledge from the social sciences should be used more extensively to improve software engineering research. Therefore, the primary objective of our research was to advance software engineering by more profoundly considering humans and their behavior. For in-depth insights into such interdisciplinary research efforts, we chose to explore a specific phenomenon: organizational change. Our secondary objective was thus to create understanding to help improve software companies’ organizational change efforts.Method To address our research objectives, we used a variety of research designs and data collection methods, including literature reviews, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and quantitative analysis of project data. This diversity allowed us to examine phenomena from different perspectives.Results We provide directions for future research on behavioral aspects of software engineering by outlining the behavioral software engineering (BSE) research area, reviewing contemporary research, and identifying industrial needs. Moreover, our findings suggest that software engineers form their attitudes toward change collectively and according to their teams’ social norms, which are governed by their distinct professional identity. Our results also indicate that misalignment of organizational values between groups adversely affects change efforts and overall performance.Conclusions Our research concludes that in order to effectively manage organizational change efforts, software companies must strengthen their organizational identity and reduce misalignment of organizational values. By providing such concrete advice on how to improve organizational change, our research confirms the usefulness of and need for additional BSE research to create novel and in-depth insights into software engineering phenomena

Effective Communication in Globally Distributed Scrum: A Model and Practical Guidance

A trend in information systems development is for globally distributed teams to use agile methods and frameworks such as Scrum. In globally distributed (GD) software development, a known challenge is effective team communication. Researchers, however, cannot evaluate effective communication in GD teams using Scrum unless they know what effective communication means in that context. This qualitative study contributes a theoretical model of effective communication in GD Scrum teams and practical guidance for practitioners. Ten industry professionals working in GD Scrum teams were interviewed to capture their understanding of effective communication. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the interviews and form a basis for the model and the practical guidance. This novel model consists of communication transparency, communication quality, and communication discipline, which together lead to the alignment of team understanding (i.e., a team-level shared mental model). This theoretical model lays the ground for future research into the effect of Scrum practices on communication in GD contexts, and the effect of communication on team and project success. For practitioners, this study contributes 11 practical actions that professionals recommend for improving and sustaining effective communication