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Exploring Norms in Agile Software Teams

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Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10027))

Abstract

The majority of software developers work in teams and are thus influenced by team norms. Norms are shared expectations of how to behave and regulate the interaction between team members. Our aim of this study is to gain more knowledge about team norms in software teams and to increase the understanding of how norms influence teamwork in agile software development projects. We conducted a study of norms in four agile teams located in Norway and Malaysia. The analysis of 22 interviews revealed that we could extract a varied set of both injunctive and descriptive norms. Our results suggest that team norms have an important role in enabling team performance.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Yngve Lindsjørn and Øystein Ingebrigtsen for assisting with data collection. We also thank the participants for sharing their experiences with us. This work was supported by the Smiglo project, which is partly funded by the Research Council of Norway under the grant 235359/O30.

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Correspondence to Viktoria Stray .

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Stray, V., Fægri, T.E., Moe, N.B. (2016). Exploring Norms in Agile Software Teams. In: Abrahamsson, P., Jedlitschka, A., Nguyen Duc, A., Felderer, M., Amasaki, S., Mikkonen, T. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10027. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49094-6_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49094-6_31

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