Directing high-performing software teams: Proposal of a capability-based assessment instrument approach

Abstract

It is not clearly understood, what high performance means for software development enterprises. Product development team performance has been investigated extensively in various industries, but software development teams and their knowledge-intensive work are still open to even fundamental questions and gaps. Software team performance is relative to the particular context. The performance outcomes of the teams are products of their specific capabilities, provided by the underlying software competencies. This paper proposes a high-performing software team capability analysis approach supported by provisional instrumentation. The goal of such an analyzer is to facilitate software teams and organizations to identify their essential capabilities and - in case of mismatches or weaknesses - to gauge the development of necessary ones. An industrial team case demonstrates how it is able to capture and characterize different team capability traits for performance analysis and improvement with respect to the overall aims of the software organization. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.