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The Influence of Agile Practices on Performance in Software Engineering Teams: A Subgroup Perspective

Published: 18 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

This research explores the influence of the agile practices daily stand-ups and retrospectives on negative effects of subgroups, i.e. of having several smaller groups within a team, on group conflict, satisfaction, and performance. Based on extant literature in agile software development (ASD) and group research, a model of effects of ASD practices and the constructs elaboration, i.e. direct sharing, of information and team reflexivity, i.e. how much teams reflect on processes and outcomes, is developed and assessed using a survey of agile teams. Previous findings on negative effects of subgroups on conflict and satisfaction are corroborated in an agile setting. Retrospectives enhance team reflexivity and elaboration of information. As expected, elaboration of information significantly attenuates effects on conflict. Surprisingly, reflexivity is seen to further exacerbate the negative effects of perceived subgroups on conflict and satisfaction.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGMIS-CPR'18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGMIS Conference on Computers and People Research
June 2018
216 pages
ISBN:9781450357685
DOI:10.1145/3209626
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 18 June 2018

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Author Tags

  1. agile software development
  2. daily stand-up
  3. retrospective
  4. subgroups
  5. team dynamics

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SIGMIS-CPR '18: 2018 Computers and People Research Conference
June 18 - 20, 2018
NY, Buffalo-Niagara Falls, USA

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