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

Agility in Information Systems – A Literature Review on Terms and Definitions

Agility is a term used in many works in the context of information systems. When studying the concept closer, it became obvious that there is a terminological heterogeneity preventing a common definition whilst at the same time not preventing the frequent use of the term. In order to approach the term in a structured way, the following two paths were chosen. Firstly, the term was traced back to its roots which showed its first appearance in organisational theory. Secondly, the major IS conferences (ECIS and ICIS) and the requirements engineering conference as a major computer science conference were analysed from 2001 when the agile manifesto was published which led to a wave of works on agility. The descriptive results are presented in the paper

Factors that influence the implementation of information and communication technology inclusive design practices in organisations

Inclusive design in information and communication technology (ICT) is the development of information and communication technology artifacts that are accessible and easy to use for as many people as possible. Human diversities must be considered when producing these inclusive design artifacts. It is not only important for abled people but also extends to people with disabilities, the elderly and anybody challenged with using these artifacts. Yet, few designers and developers adopt inclusive design methodologies in their practice. This study seeks to identify and understand the factors that influence the implementation of inclusive design practices in organisations. The methodology was based on a qualitative enquiry approach. Semi structured interviews were used to collect data from South African organisations and thematic analysis employed for analysis. Of the five factors presented in the findings, diversity was shown to be the most influential in the implementation of inclusive design practices in organisations. These results have implications on organisational culture and practices

Team drivers and knowledge sharing in the performance management of agile projects

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementOrganizations are adopting agile methodologies to create value, be competitive, and quickly respond to market changes to satisfy customers. As a result of these challenges, projects are increasingly complex, strategic, and must be addressed by efficient teams during a limited amount of time to deliver high value. We study the agile project performance with a mixed methods approach. We surveyed 160 agile practitioners and conducted six interviews with agile experts. Our results indicate that team autonomy, team diversity, and team resilience affect knowledge sharing. We also find that team resilience and risk monitoring influence the agile project performance

Team Diversity and Performance – How Agile Practices and Psychological Safety Interact

Information system development is largely dependent on social interaction and team work. Team composition, team processes, and behavior among, as well as agile practices used by team members play an important role for the success of information system development projects. Especially team resilience, the capacity to recover quickly from crises, is important in an ever-changing environment. Recent research in organizational psychology found team diversity and psychological safety to be important factors for team performance. In increasing diverse teams, these findings become more and more important. In this paper, we propose a model and research design to investigate the effects of team diversity, psychological safety, and social agile practices on team resilience and team performance in agile software development. The proposed model combines recent research in the field of organizational psychology with agile information system research to provide a better understanding of the team-level effects at play in agile software development