Team Performance in Agile Software Development Projects: The Effects of Requirements Changes, Time Pressure, Team Diversity, and Conflict

Information system development has traditionally been accompanied by changing requirements throughout projects. While recent research clarifies how time pressure affects team performance, the interplay between time pressure, requirements changes, and various other important factors such as team diversity is unclear. In this paper, we evaluate a novel and unified model based on extant research explaining the interactions of requirements changes, time pressure, temporal leadership, team diversity, and conflict as well as their effect on team performance. Further, we differentiate between the overall team performance and the team’s ability to respond both efficiently and extensively to requirements changes. The proposed model helps in composing and steering teams to increase their resilience towards requirements changes and time pressure. A first evaluation is based on a quantitative field study in multiple agile software development projects of student teams