Understanding the Design of Software Development Teams for Academic Scenarios

The software engineering community recognizes that human factors of developers directly influence the behavior and performance of software teams. Typically, cohesive teams tend to develop software in a more coordinated and effective way, resulting in suitable products. Although these cohesive teams could be designed to try reaching such benefits, there is no recipe that allows us to do it in a simple way. Therefore, most of the software teams are formed using any other criteria, by losing thus the potential benefits of using cohesive teams. The problem of designing these teams is not only present in the software industry, but also in the academia; particularly in capstone courses, where the students run software projects in real or simulated scenarios. In order to help find a solution to this problem, particularly for academic settings, this paper proposes a heuristic to form software development teams, considering the psycho-social profile of the students. This heuristic was used to design teams for a software engineering project course at the University of Chile, and these teams' performance was compared to those from teams designed using random allocation of student to teams. The results indicate that teams designed using the heuristic were more effective in terms of internal communication and coordination than the other teams. Moreover, the former obtained products with a quality higher than the latter.