Software team processes: A taxonomy

A software development team must integrate many process perspectives imposed by the client, the organization, team management, and team dynamics. All these perspectives intermingle at the team process level. We propose a taxonomy to define the various episodes observed at this level and a useful vocabulary for reporting the observations made. Our taxonomy is based on a previous literature review performed in the business management field and adapted in this paper for the software engineering field. It was applied on existing data obtained from a real project carried out with an industrial partner. The vocabulary defined can accurately present team interactions, and may help diagnose communication breakdowns leading to project failures. The benefit of this approach is that it enables team process activities to be measured without reference to specific concepts related to perspectives other than that of the team process.