IMPACT OF GROUP DYNAMICS ON TEAMS WORKING IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Abstract: Context: Group dynamics play an important role in software projects. All of the existing software engineering methodologies (like Rational Unified Process, Microsoft Solutions Framework, Agile, etc.) use the concept of the teamwork and emphasize the necessity to manage them in order to organize the business processes in the best way. The application of group dynamic techniques is aimed at improvement of teamwork management to make it more efficient. The implementation of group dynamic techniques has an impact on teams working in software engineering and it also faces some challenges for industry such as lack of resources and preparation. Both need additional investigation which regard to the actual practiced situation in industry. Objectives: The given work is devoted to identification of group dynamics techniques and their impact on teams in the context of industrial software development projects. The objectives of the research is to identify the existing and in an industrial context, actually used group dynamics techniques in software engineering as well as their impact and methods of its evaluation. Since the application of group dynamics techniques is not a trivial task, we also identify those challenges and corresponding mitigation strategies. Methods: The basic methods applied during the research conduction are systematic literature review and survey. Literature review was used in order to collect the data on group dynamics techniques, their impact and implementation challenges. The survey and additional interviews with the practitioners from the software development companies were done with the purpose to find out which of the techniques are applied in practice. Results: Based on the data from systematic literature review we identified group dynamics techniques such as equalizing participation, electronic communication, conflict resolution, summarizing, whole and small group discussions, brainstorming, etc. The discovered impacts include team performance and cohesiveness, staff satisfaction and communication quality, software quality, reasonable decision-making and knowledge sharing. The possible challenges of group dynamics techniques implementation are company’s limited resources, lack of leadership and preparation, over-dominating of some team members and cultural diversity. The survey provided us with additional information about the importance of mentioned group dynamics techniques and their impact on team performance and cohesiveness, job satisfaction and software quality. Conclusions: We conclude that group dynamics techniques in software development projects influence the performance and cohesiveness of the teamwork as well as the quality of the software solutions and products. The possible challenges can be overcome by promotion of open communication and trust among team members, and additional psychological preparation and training of facilitator. The research discovered a slight difference in the literature review and survey results. In particular we found out that, some group dynamics techniques are overestimated in literature, while the others are undervalued. Also the survey results helped to identify the techniques such as small group discussion, conflict resolution and many more were used by the teams of definite size, which was not possible to discover in the SLR for example large teams pay much attention to feedback and electronic communication The obtained results can be used by software engineering practitioners in order to organize and rearrange their teamwork, which can positively affect team performance and project success.