Optimizing development performance through team composition and team culture factors in modern software development organizations

Modern organizations that follow Agile development principles and practice DevOps aim at maximizing software release frequency while minimizing the number of defects associated with them. To achieve this goal, the companies perform the organizational transformation that is associated with significant costs and time investments. The key to success is building high-performing development teams. The existing literature does not extensively cover development performance optimization in DevOps organizations that are in the process of transformation. It provides limited information for the organizations willing to speed up the process and remove the paint points. As the result, organizations suffer economic losses from adjusting the development practices the transformation process, taking the new technology to the customers takes longer time comparing to the high performing organizations, which can be seen as losses for the modern highly digitalized economy. This study explores whether the team composition, team culture and other organizational factors influence performance of development teams by surveying high-performant organizations that completed the transformation, and fitting a statistical model the collected data. The model validates assumptions and serves as a useful tool for low-performing organizations to adjust their team composition and culture accordingly. The novel metrics for assessing the development team performance in the DevOps context is proposed. The research concludes that teams that are mainly composed of developers and have access to shared expertise of principal DevOps and Security engineers placed outside of the team, perform the best. Autonomy of developers within the team is another significant factor for achieving the optimal performance. This confirms findings about individual autonomy of the classic studies and places them into the modern DevOps context. The study shows that there exists no direct relationship between the number of quality engineers and quality which may indicate a turn in the classic QA theory that assumes QA engineers as integral player in organizational quality. Finally, it estimates an optimal rate of developers and non-developers in a team for the highest performance and demonstrates that high performance can be achieved by organizations regardless of sizes, product types and modern development methodologies