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.