An automated software team formation based Belbin team role using fuzzy technique

In software engineering (SE), team plays an important role in determining the project success. To ensure the optimal outcome of the project the team is working on, it is essential to ensure that the team comprises of the members with right characteristics. In a team assigning the right role to each team member in order to make certain that the most appropriate individuals are chosen for specific tasks and their efforts contribute maximum to the overall team performance. One of the prevalent team roles is Belbin team role. Belbin developed this theory for formation a successful team. This theory is centered on the team roles and how they should be matched in order to avoid conflicts and build sound teams that are optimally managed. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to develop an automated software team formation method based on Belbin Team Role by using a Fuzzy technique. Fuzzy technique was chosen because it allows analyzing of imprecise data and classifying selected criteria. In this study, two roles in Belbin Team role, which are Shaper (Sh) and Plant (Pl) were chosen to assign the specific role in software team – team leader and programmer, respectively. These roles were chosen because the combination of these roles is able to determine effective team members in SE team. The proposed automated software team formation was then evaluated using an expert review. The participants consist of 12 software developers from Asiacell Telecommunication Company in Kurdistan Region Government of Iraq (KRG). The results demonstrate that the method is useful to be used for forming SE team in industrial setting. The proposed automated software team formation can serve as a useful tool for managers when assigning new team members to a software project. In addition, by using the proposed method, it can help decision makers specifically managers to form effective and equal teams. Effective and equal teams can have an equal chance to experience good team work and thus, to be a successful team

Team leader selection by using an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique

One of the important elements in building effective teamwork is team leader selection.In a team, leadership is the most significant role which contributes to the success of a software project.During team leader selection, there are several criteria that should be considered for decision makers.With regard to this problem, selecting team leader can be considered as Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem.One of the most popular techniques of MCDM that can be employed in selecting the suitable team leader is Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP).AHP techniques consists of three key principles which are hierarchy framework, priority analysis and consistency verification.Thus, this paper presents AHP steps to select suitable team leader based on four criteria which are personality type, academic achievement, teamwork experience, and previous programming grade.Result illustrates that AHP technique can assist decision maker to effectively evaluate the alternatives in order to select suitable team leader, particularly for Software Engineering (SE) education community