Relating team atmosphere and group dynamics to student software development teams' performance

Context: While the software engineering community (i.e., those involved with engineering software) is constantly in search of insights into team atmosphere and group dynamics and the way these issues impact team performance, little opportunities typically exist to explore this issue. Student projects offer an opportunity for us to understand these issues, and particularly if these students are on the verge of leaving university for post-study work and using similar practices to those used in industry.Objective: We explore a range of student software development projects' data and students' open-ended responses to five group dynamics categories: communication, time management, commitment, problem analysis and solving, and initiative and involvement.Method: We analyse both quantitative and qualitative data to study the variation in group dynamics across teams developing different software and how these variations correlated with team satisfaction. We also explore the group dynamics themes that evolve from students' open responses in relation to the five categories. Furthermore, we relate the prevalence of the themes to various software development performance metrics, before exploring the opportunity of predicting an optimum team dynamics.Results: We observe variations in the way different teams work, but higher performing teams also committed more to their projects. Various group dynamics themes were evident among functional teams, and specific patterns were more pronounced when teams were productive. Further, while there is no specific group dynamics pattern that predicts project success, successful teams were most organised and reflective.Conclusion: Competence may set the tone for positive group dynamics and team performance. Also, an achievement-driven orientation is as important as the soft skills and interpersonal aspects.