A Study of Software Development Team Dynamics in SPI

Abstract. The software development team is a key factor in software projects,
however, achieving and maintaining positive team dynamics in software
development project especially when the software companies have fewer
resources in term of people, money and time is a remarkable challenge. This
paper explores the dynamics of software development teams (structure,
process, communication, learning and sharing) and its impact on Software
Process Improvement (SPI) in very small software organization, in order to
understand the impact between these two variables. We undertook a series of
interviews and focus groups with very small software companies and our results
show that very small companies have a high level of team dynamics although
their SPI initiatives are conducted on a small scale and in an informal and
indirect manner. The results also indicated that this situation occurs due to the
working and social relationship, willingness to share, having a good
interpersonal skill and work closely each others.
Keywords: SPI, VSEs, Team Dynamics, Grounded Theory (GT).