Assessing team performance from a socio-technical congruence perspective

Abstract

There are many factors that provide input into the software development process, such as the values, beliefs, norms, practices, skills, behaviors, knowledge and goals of stakeholders. Research has shown that successful software system development relies on alignment or congruence between these factors. How to monitor the level of congruence between these factors and how to use the congruence as an indicator or a measure to monitor a software development process is a challenge in software engineering. This paper proposes a model that uses three congruence measures to examine the levels of social-technical congruence in software development processes. Using a controlled experiment with seven student teams developing a robot project, this paper demonstrates that the proposed congruence measures provide results consistent with the assessment by the course lecturers.