Background: Over the past decades, advancements in the software industry and the prevalence of Agile Software Development (ASD) practices have increased the prominence of individual and interpersonal skills. The humancentric nature of ASD practices makes it imperative to identify and to assign a capable professional to a team. While capabilities of professionals influence team performance and lead the path to a project’s success, the area of capability measurement in ASD remains largely unexplored.

Objectives: This thesis aims to aggregate evidence from both the state of the art and practice to understand capability measurement in ASD. Further, to support research and practice towards composing agile teams, this thesis also investigates the effects of capability measures on team-level aspects (team performance and team climate) within industrial contexts.

Method: A mixed-methods approach was employed to address the thesis’ objectives. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and an industrial survey were conducted to identify and gather evidence in relation to individual and team capability measures, which are pertinent to ASD context. A case study and another industrial survey were carried out to provide insights and extend support towards agile team composition.

Results: Our SLR results showed that a major portion of former studies discussed capability measures in relation to affective, communication, interpersonal and personal aspects. Results from our survey also aligned with these findings, where, measures associated with the aforementioned aspects were observed to be widely known to practitioners and were also perceived by them as highly relevant in ASD contexts. Our case study conducted at a small-sized organization revealed multiple professional capability measures to be affecting team performance. Whereas, our survey conducted at a large-sized organization identified an individual’s ability to easily get along with other team members (agreeableness personality trait) to have a significant positive influence on the person’s perceived level of team climate.

Conclusion: In this thesis, the empirical evidence gathered by employing mixed-methods and examining diverse organizational contexts, contributed towards better realization of capability measurement in ASD. In order to extend support towards team composition in ASD, this thesis presents two approaches. The first approach is based on developing an agile support tool that coordinates capability assessments and team composition. The second approach is based on establishing team climate forecasting models that can provide insights about how the perceived level of climate within a team would vary based on its members’ personalities. However, in order to improve both approaches, it is certainly necessary to examine the effects of diverse capability measures.

Background: 

The prevalence of Agile Software Development (ASD) practices has increased the prominence of individual and interpersonal skills. The human-centric nature of ASD practices makes it imperative for identifying and assigning capable professionals to constitute a workable team. Despite evidence from previous research in relation to the influence of workforce skillset and the effects of team climate factors on the performance of a team, the areas of capability measurement and factors influencing team climate in ASD remain largely unexplored. 

Objectives:

This thesis aims to aggregate evidence, from both former literature and current day practice, towards investigating capability measurement in ASD. Further, to address the gap in relation to team climate research in the ASD context, this thesis also investigates the effects of capability measures on team climate factors within industrial contexts.

Method:

A mixed-method approach was employed to address the thesis’ objectives, where a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and multiple industrial surveys were conducted. A state of the practice survey (S1) was conducted to identify and gather evidence regarding capability measures relevant to the ASD context. To determine the relationship between capability measures pertaining to professionals and an agile team’s climate, first an industrial survey (S2) was carried out to study the influence of personality traits. Then, survey S2 was replicated twice (S3) and was further extended to examine the impact of other capability measures, in addition to personality traits (S4). 

Results:

Our SLR retrieved individual and team capability measures, where measures in relation to communication, interpersonal, and personal aspects were majorly emphasized by previous studies. Results from survey S1, where agile practitioners from multiple organizations participated, aligned with our SLR findings and practitioners perceived the majority of the SLR’s measures as relevant to ASD context. Further, the surveys conducted within a large-sized telecom company – S2, S3 and S4, brought to light multiple significant relationships that some of the capability measures showed with team climate factors. The meta-analytic effects observed by analyzing three samples gathered from surveys S2 and S3 showed that a rise in the neuroticism level of a person corresponded to a slight decline in the person’s perceived level of team climate. Further, our investigations identified that the inclusion of a wide range of capability measures, i.e., measures comprising both personality traits and other social aspects of capability measures, as input to regression models could explain more variance in the team climate factors.

Conclusion:

The empirical evidence gathered by employing mixed-methods and examining diverse organizational contexts, contributed towards better realization of capability measurement in ASD and identifying factors affecting agile team climate. The comprehensive list of capability measures acquired by our SLR were validated, through an industrial survey, by experienced agile practitioners who were associated with diverse roles and domains. This makes our SLR findings applicable to a wider audience. The findings from multiple surveys executed in industrial agile contexts showed that capability measures of team members contributed to a small, yet significant, portion of the variance in team climate factors, indicating the need to consider human factors and their effect upon team climate, and the need for gathering further data from diverse contexts, and perhaps to also include additional human factors. However, while applying the uncovered relationships to practice, one needs to evaluate whether they are valid (and to what degree). We believe a long-term inspection of capability measures can aid towards acquiring more data that would be necessary to establish robust team climate prediction models.