Organizational Climate Assessment of Trust, Knowledge, Learning, and Motivation of Agile Teams - A Case Study

• Eliezer Dutra Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) / Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica Celso Suckow da Fonseca (CEFET-RJ)
• Cristina Cerdeiral Nest Wealth
• Patrícia Lima Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO)
• Bruna Diirr Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO)
• Gleison Santos Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO)

Resumo

Context: Organizational climate management is challenging for organizations developing Management Information Systems (MIS). Turnover, legacy code maintenance, delivery of fixed deadlines, lack of domain knowledge influences team trust, learning, and member motivation. Organizational climate surveys can provide concrete evidence of how the process, project activities, people, and culture work in practice. Problem: Not assessing specific human factors that contribute to the formation of agile teams’ climate inhibits the capacity for an assertive diagnosis, entailing difficulties for the analysis of possible causes of problems and the execution of corrective actions within climate management. Solution: We present the preliminary evaluation of TACT, an instrument to assess the organizational climate of agile teams, considering the Trust, Knowledge, Learning, and Motivation. IS Theory: Agile Software Development Methods (ASDM) and their effects. Method: TACT was developed using Design Science Research. We executed a case study in a Brazilian and a Canadian organization. We evaluated TACT using quantitative and qualitative methods. Summary of Results: TACT captured that the product owner's lack of knowledge and experience probably influenced the adverse climate in team trust and that unrealistic deadlines may have generated a lack of team motivation due to an absence of autonomy to plan the iteration. The team leaders reported intention of future use. Contributions and Impact in the IS area: TACT dimensions presented high levels of reliability and can be used to better identify issues and improve actions aligned with the agile values, principles, and practices while developing Information Systems.

Palavras-chave: Organizational climate, Agile software development, Human factors

Referências

Hisham Alasad. 2020. The Impact of Agile Processes on Organisational Behaviour Within Current Banking Practice. Master degree. Auckland University of Technology. [link].

Enas Almanasreh, Rebekah Moles, and Timothy F. Chen. 2019. Evaluation of methods used for estimating content validity. Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy 15, 2 (feb 2019), 214–221. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sapharm.2018.03.066

K Beck, M Beedle, and et al. Bennekum, A Van. 2001. Manifesto for Agile Software Development. https://agilemanifesto.org/

Pankaj Bhatt, Gautam Shroff, C. Anantaram, and Arun Kumar Misra. 2006. An influence model for factors in outsourced software maintenance. Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice 18, 6 (nov 2006), 385–423. https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.339

Barry Boehm and Richard Turner. 2003. Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed (1 ed.). Pearson Education, Boston (USA). 304 pages. 

Aline Chagas, Melquizedequi Santos, Celio Santana, and Alexandre Vasconcelos. 2015. The Impact of Human Factors on Agile Projects. In 2015 Agile Conference. IEEE, National Harbor, MD, USA, 87–91. https://doi.org/10.1109/Agile.2015.11

Elena Delgado-Rico, Hugo Carretero-Dios, and Willibald Ruch. 2012. Content validity evidences in test development: An applied perspective. International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology 12, 3(2012), 449–460. https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-64551

Team Digital.ai. 2020. 14th Annual State of Agile Report. Technical Report. Digital.ai. 1–19 pages. [link].

Eliezer Dutra, Bruna Diirr, and Gleison Santos. 2021. Human Factors and Their Influence on Software Development Teams - A Tertiary Study. In Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (Joinville, Brazil) (SBES ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 442–451. https://doi.org/10.1145/3474624.3474625

Eliezer Dutra, Patricia Lima, and Gleison Santos. 2020. An Instrument to Assess the Organizational Climate of Agile Teams - A Preliminary Study. In 19th Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality. ACM, São Luis, Brazil, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3439961.3439968

Eliezer Dutra and Gleison Santos. 2020. Organisational climate assessments of Agile teams – a qualitative multiple case study. IET Software 14, 7 (nov 2020), 861–870. https://doi.org/10.1049/iet-sen.2020.0048

Andy Field, Jeremy Miles, and Zoe Field. 2012. Discovering Statistics Using R(1 ed.). SAGE Publications, London. 958 pages. 

Eliezer Goncalves, Patrícia Lima, Cristina Cerdeiral, Bruna Diirr, and Gleison Santos. 2022. TACT: An insTrument to Assess the organizational ClimaTe of agile teams - A Preliminary Study. Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development 9, 1(2022), 18:1 – 18:20. https://doi.org/10.5753/jserd.2021.1973

Daniel Graziotin, Per Lenberg, Robert Feldt, and Stefan Wagner. 2020. Psychometrics in Behavioral Software Engineering: A Methodological Introduction with Guidelines. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. I, 1 (may 2020), Article 111 – 49 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.11224561 arxiv:2005.09959

DE Hinkle, W Wiersma, and SG Jurs. 2003. Applied Statistics for the Behavioural Sciences (5 ed.). Houghton Mifflin, Boston. 

Philipp Hohl, Jil Klünder, Arie van Bennekum, Ryan Lockard, James Gifford, Jürgen Münch, Michael Stupperich, and Kurt Schneider. 2018. Back to the future: origins and directions of the “Agile Manifesto” – views of the originators. Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development 6, 1 (dec 2018), 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40411-018-0059-z

Adarsh Kumar Kakar. 2020. A Theory of Agile Software Development. In Southern Association for Information Systems (SAIS 2020) Proceedings. AISeL, Virtually, 8. https://aisel.aisnet.org/sais2020/32

Malcolm G. Patterson, Michael A. West, Viv J. Shackleton, Jeremy F. Dawson, Rebecca Lawthom, Sally Maitlis, David L. Robinson, and Alison M. Wallace. 2005. Validating the organizational climate measure: links to managerial practices, productivity and innovation. Journal of Organizational Behavior 26, 4 (jun 2005), 379–408. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.312

Project Management Institute PMI and Agile Alliance Agile Alliance. 2017. Agile Practice Guide(1st ed.). PMI, Pennsylvania. 

Jan Recker. 2013. Scientific Research in Information Systems. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30048-6

Fabio Reginaldo and Gleison Santos. 2020. Challenges in Agile Transformation Journey. In Proceedings of the 34th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11–20. https://doi.org/10.1145/3422392.3422436

William Revelle. 2018. How to: Use the psych package for factor analysis and data reduction. Technical Report. Northwestern University. 1–90 pages. 

P. Serrador, A. Gemino, and Blaize Horner. 2018. Creating a climate for project success. Journal of Modern Project Management May/August (2018), 38–47. https://doi.org/10.19255/JMPM01604

Arpita Sharma and Aayushi Gupta. 2012. Impact of organisational climate and demographics on project specific risks in context to Indian software industry. International Journal of Project Management 30, 2 (feb 2012), 176–187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2011.05.003

Sofia Sherman, Irit Hadar, and Gil Luria. 2018. Leveraging organizational climate theory for understanding industry-academia collaboration. Information and Software Technology 98 (jun 2018), 148–160. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.INFSOF.2017.12.006

Arjumand Bano Soomro, Norsaremah Salleh, Emilia Mendes, John Grundy, Giles Burch, and Azlin Nordin. 2016. The effect of software engineers’ personality traits on team climate and performance: A Systematic Literature Review. Information and Software Technology 73, May 2016 (2016), 52–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2016.01.006

Paul Spector. 1992. Summated Rating Scale Construction: An Introduction. Sage Publications, Inc, California. 

Ming-Ten Tsai and Nai-Chang Cheng. 2010. Programmer perceptions of knowledge-sharing behavior under social cognitive theory. Expert Systems with Applications 37, 12 (dec 2010), 8479–8485. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2010.05.029

Viswanath Venkatesh and Hillol Bala. 2008. Technology Acceptance Model 3 and a Research Agenda on Interventions. Decision Sciences 39, 2 (may 2008), 273–315. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5915.2008.00192.x

Sai Datta Vishnubhotla, Emilia Mendes, and Lars Lundberg. 2020. Investigating the relationship between personalities and agile team climate of software professionals in a telecom company. Information and Software Technology 126 (oct 2020), 106335.