The Impact of Teamwork Quality (TWQ) on Agile Software Development Team Performance

Abstract

Purpose: The study examined the extent to which teamwork quality (TWQ) impacts team performance in the Agile software development space in the U.S. and how the TWQ factors (Communication, coordination of expertise, cohesion, trust, mutual support & value sharing) are ranked in terms of importance to team performance Materials and Methods: The study used correlation and regression analysis to determine the degree of the relationship and the effect of the extended TWQ factors on Agile software team performance. Additionally, the study assessed the relative importance of the TWQ factors to team performance. Participants in the study included IT workers from the software development team in U.S. companies with in-house teams using the Agile methodology. Data was collected using an online survey through survey monkey. The data was presented through descriptive statistics and analyzed using regression analysis. Findings: The study found all the extended TWQ factors were strongly correlated to the team performance. The analysis showed that a statistically significance predictive relationship exists between the extended TWQ factors and Agile software development team performance. However, only mutual support and value sharing contributed statistically significantly to the model. Among these factors, mutual support was ranked as the most important TWQ factor in relation to team performance, while trust was ranked as the least. Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: This empirical study tested and extended the TWQ model on team performance in the Agile software development space in the U.S. for software development teams and how these TWQ factors are ranked in terms of importance to team performance. The findings provide insight to project teams and team leaders, product owners, scrum masters, and project managers about the TWQ model from the perspective of agile software development teams. The findings also address the critical TWQ factors that are needed for building effective and efficient Agile software development teams.