What Do We Know about High Performance Teams in Software Engineering? Results from a Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

A high performance team is one that exceeds all reasonable expectations and produces extraordinary results. In this work, we are interested in understanding contexts and conditions in which software engineering teams are likely to achieve this status. To this end, we are carrying out a systematic literature review to identify what are the known factors that booster or hinder the performance of software engineering teams, and what evidence is available to support such factors. In this preliminary effort, we selected 15 papers from SCOPUS, analyzed them following a qualitative meta-summary procedure. As a result, we present a summary of characteristics that positively and negatively influence different process of the teamwork, based on evidence available in the literature. This work constitutes a key preliminary result towards the design of more elaborate models and theories to predict and explain the performance of software engineering teams.