Social Team Characteristics and Architectural Decisions: a Goal-oriented Approach

Organizational and social factors like the geographical distribution of team members or their skill levels can have a significant impact on software architectural decisions. In our previous work, we have developed a framework based on the Goal Requirements Language (GRL) to model the interdependencies between project contributors, their realization efforts and the intended project deliverables. Based on our daily work in industrial e-commerce projects, further experiences have shown that the composition of a software development team in terms of social and psychological characteristics of the team members is just as important. Structure-analytical methods like the well established team role model of Belbin are a suitable mean to capture these personal qualities in a systematic way. The obtained information is incorporated into our framework to enable the documentation, the analysis and the discussion of the coherence between social factors and the work-breakdown structure in software development projects.