A Follow Up Study into the Effect of Disruptions on the Performance of Software Engineering Teams

This paper describes follow up research carried out on software engineering teams composed of students who were engaged in the Maxi project, one of the group projects in operation at the University of Sheffield. Once again an online version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was used to ascertain the personality type of the students and the teams were observed in meetings throughout the project. The previous study had shown that teams who failed to discuss pertinent issues to a satisfactory level ran the greatest risk of encountering serious project problems. In the follow up study lack of debate was not such a serious problem, with more problems caused by what one might term interpersonal issues, i.e. inter-team squabbles, sarcasm, and lack of cohesion