Team Performance in Agile Development Teams: Findings from 18 Focus Groups

How to make teams perform well is increasingly important in software development, as agile development methods prescribe development in small teams. Team performance has been studied in a number of research fields, and there are many models of what enables team performance. A central question then is how relevant these models are for agile development teams. This article investigates the following research question: What factors do agile software practitioners perceive to influence effective teamwork, through a focus group study with 92 participants in 18 groups. The main findings are that what agile practitioners perceive foster and hinder team performance seems to comply well with what is stated in an existing research-based model. However, agile practitioners seem to place insufficient focus on backup behaviour. Agile practitioners place much emphasis on physical and technical infrastructure of the development team as enablers of team performance.