Realising Individual and Team Capability in Agile Software Development: A Qualitative Investigation

Abstract

Several studies have shown that both individual and team capability can affect software development performance and project success; a deeper understating of such phenomena is crucial within the context of Agile Software Development (ASD), given that its workforce is a key source of agility. This paper contributes towards such understanding by means of a case study that uses data from 14 interviews carried out at a large telecommunications company, within the context of a mobile money transfer system developed in Sweden and India, to identify individual and team capability measures used to form productive teams. Our results identified 10 individual and five team capability measures, of which, respectively, five and four have not been previously characterised by a systematic literature review (SLR) on this same topic. Such review aggregated evidence for a total of 133 individual and 28 team capability measures. Further work entails extending our findings via interviewing other software/software-intensive industries practicing ASD.