Browsing by Subject "team performance improvement"

The rapid progress of communication technologies combined with the growing competition for talents and knowledge has made it necessary to reassess the potential of distributed development which has significantly changed the landscape of the IT industry introducing a variety of cooperation models and making notable changes to the software team work environment. Along with this, enterprises pay more attention to teams’ performance improvement, employing emerging management tools for building up efficient software teams, and trying to get the most out of understanding factors which significantly impact a team’s overall performance. The objective of the research is to systematize factors characterizing high-performing software teams; indicate the benefits of global software development (GSD) models positively influencing software teams’ development performance; and study how companies’ strategies can benefit from distributed development approaches in building high-performing software teams. The thesis is designed as a combination of a systematic literature review followed by qualitative research in the form of semi-structured interviews to validate the findings regarding classification of GSD models’ benefits and their influence on the development of high-performing software teams. At a literature review stage, the research (1) introduces a team performance factors’ model reflecting the aspects which impact the effectiveness of development teams; (2) suggests the classification of GSD models based on organizational, legal, and temporal characteristics, and (3) describes the benefits of GSD models which influence the performance of software development teams. Within the empirical part of the study, we refine the classification of GSD models’ benefits based on the qualitative analysis results of semi-structured interviews with practitioners from IT industry, form a comparison table of GSD benefits depending on the model in question, and introduce recommendations for company and team management regarding the application of GSD in building high-performing software teams. IT corporations, to achieve their strategic goals, can enrich their range of available tools for managing high-performing teams by considering the peculiarities of different GSD models. Company and team management should evaluate the advantages of the distributed operational models, and use the potential and benefits of available configurations to increase teams’ performance and build high-performing software teams.